Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement (review)

In Higher Education and Democracy: Essays on Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, John Saltmarsh, Co-Director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Edward Zlotkowski, a professor of English at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, explore the civic purpose of higher education, specifically through service-learning pedagogy.

In this text, Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski bring together essays originally published between 1995 and 2010 that clarify and review service-learning initiatives. The authors state two purposes for this collection of essays: (a) to provide a single text to help facilitate and clarify national service-learning and civic engagement initiatives, and (b) to reclaim service-learning as significant to the civic purposes of higher education.

While the 22 essays in this book cover a wide spread of publication dates, the essays are organized thematically rather than chronologically. The authors have grouped the essays into eight sections progressing from general to specific practices. The volume concludes with remarks on the future of the civic engagement.

The first and second sections focus on the call for civic engagement in contemporary higher education and its historical roots. In Part 1, “General Need,” Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski recognize the need for newly engaged civic institutions and challenge educators to move forward in educating and promoting civic engagement. These essays provide readers with a picture of the overall state of civic education in higher education.

Part 2, “Antecedents,” creates a foundation for this current status by focusing on the historical roots of civic engagement. They feature John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Dorothy Day’s contribution to and influence on community service in American culture. Combined, they provide a perspective of early thought and how the concepts of community service and service-learning began and evolved.

Part 3, “Service-Learning Pedagogy,” brings together three previously published essays by Saltmarsh and Zlotkowski. Each discusses service-learning pedagogy’s connection to academic engagement. In Zlotkowski’s chapter, “Does Service-Learning Have a Future?” he tackles the issue of intellectual resource allocation. His insights provide not only a realistic perspective of challenges, but also strategies in how to incorporate service-learning into the academic culture.

Parts 4 and 5 focus on service-learning in higher education curricula. The fourth section, “Service-Learning in the Curriculum: The First Year,” includes essays on service-learning and students’ first-year experience. As John Gardner states in the section’s introduction, “This publication should serve as a wake-up call to the now legions of educators who are invested in the so-called ‘first-year experience’ movement that we still have a long, long way to go” (p. 131).

Section 5, “Service-Learning in the Curriculum: The Disciplines,” makes a broad sweep of service-learning in the disciplines. Dialogue with academic disciplines must continue in order to advance the development of civic engagement and its application in all disciplinary contexts. As Zlotkowski discusses in “The Disciplines and the Public Good,” Boyer (1996) legitimized the ties between discipline and society in general with his concept of the “scholarship of engagement.”

Zlotkowski provides discipline-specific examples of the developments toward the scholarship of engagement by pulling from association statements and reports, including the Association of American Geographers and the American Chemical Society. He further supports expanding civic engagement through service-learning across all disciplines by providing several institutional models which provide both practitioners and researchers with concrete examples of service-learning in action.

Parts 6 and 7, “Engaged Departments” and “The Engaged Campus,” focus on service-learning and civic engagement at different levels of higher education institutions. Zlotkowski and Saltmarsh argue that academic departments must take leadership in reforming community engagement within their disciplines. Further, they underscore the need for departments to be involved in interdisciplinary creativity in regards to civic engagement. These chapters explore “often competing views of the purpose of American higher education with the intent...