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  • Engaged Learning in the Academy: Challenges and Possibilities by David Thornton Moore
  • Valerie Osland Paton
David Thornton Moore. Engaged Learning in the Academy: Challenges and Possibilities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 228 pp. Hardcover: $70.80. ISBN: 978–1–137–02518–0.

Engaged Learning in the Academy: Challenges and Possibilities offers a systematic treatment of situated learning that is an important contribution to literature and valuable as higher education institutions seek to create more of these opportunities for students. David Thornton Moore is well known as an anthropologist of education and work. He was honored by the National Society of Experiential Education as Researcher of the Year in 2004. Moore serves on the faculty of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

This book is a must read for faculty teaching and administrators leading engaged learning activities. Moore’s writing style and rich knowledge of curriculum, pedagogy, and higher education provokes a broader consideration of the challenges and opportunities offered by experiential learning and the necessary support from faculty and the academy to leverage such learning opportunities.

In the first chapter of eight, Moore opens with a candid and balanced discussion of “The Paradox of Experiential Learning in Higher Education.” Moore introduces this fascinating analysis with a description of the current state of experiential learning. Despite significant support for experiential learning in higher education, it remains at the margins of the academy. He asserts that this [End Page 424] paradox speaks directly to the current challenges to the roles and functions of higher education, faculty, and students. Throughout the text, Moore’s examines many forms of experiential learning, including internships, cooperatives, service learning, civic engagement, and field work—all characterized by non-classroom, experience-based learning.

In the second chapter, “A Theoretical Framework,” Moore addresses foundational literature to establish the basis for his analysis of experience-based learning that follows in the remaining chapters. Moore observes that experiential educators typically cite the theoretical work of Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, and Kolb. However, this literature “oversimplifies some elements of the phenomenon” (p. 18) of experiential learning. Therefore, he provides a rich critique of their work, drawing the reader’s attentions to the limitations inherent in the literature to date. With this context in mind, Moore identifies four basic concepts as the theoretical framework he uses in his own analysis: knowledge, learning, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Chapter 3, “Analyzing the Curriculum of Experience,” introduces the research question, “How can we best describe, analyze, and explain the kinds of things student-interns learn as they engage in work or community service in the real world, outside of school?” (p. 43). In addressing this question, Moore utilizes four student projects, all situated in non-classroom environments. Three are internships, located respectively at a state history museum, a federal agency, and a fashion magazine. The fourth is a civic engagement course that incorporated “Participatory Action Research” in a community undergoing economic and social change.

From these experiences, he describes the “forms of knowledge-use” (p. 45) that can be observed in non-classroom settings, organizing them into the following categories: facts and information, concepts, skills and competencies, social and organizational knowledge, personal development, and values and ethics. Across these categories are common features of curricula that vary and affect learning: (a) modes of thought—“the ways students are expected to think, to define and solve problems, to organize information” (p. 58); (b) pragmatics—the “social meaning of the learning activity in the context in which it occurs” (p. 60); (c) trajectory—the development that occurs in the experiential learning environment related to the “content, complexity, and importance of [a student’s work], and the degree of autonomy and status” achieved by the student (p. 60); and (d) ordering—the order or sequence in which the student accesses the knowledge available in the situated learning environment.

In addition, he discusses those factors that shape the curriculum of the experiential environment, including the personal characteristics of the student, the unique features of the organizational setting, and the environment in which the organization functions. Moore provides a unique view of what can be learned in these contexts and supplies the reader with a structured approach for...

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