What We’re Reading: Education as Civic Engagement (2012)

EDUCATION AS CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: Toward a More Democratic Society

Edited by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham

September 2012

Education as Civic Engagement: Toward a More Democratic Society is a collection of ten essays examining education—mostly higher education—as civic engagement. These essays are the finest works of scholarship on education published over the last decade in JAC, an award-winning journal of rhetoric, politics, and culture. Collectively, the works in this volume analyze in a substantive and rigorous manner a number of key issues in the politics of education.

About the Editors

Gary A. Olson is a noted scholar of rhetoric and culture and a keen observer of higher education in America. He has served as a both a university provost and a dean. Olson writes a popular monthly column on academic administration for the Chronicle of Higher Education and currently is a professor of English at Idaho State University.

Lynn Worsham is a professor of English at Idaho State University and editor of JAC, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal of rhetoric, politics, and culture. She has published seven books, including The Politics of Possibility: Encountering the Radical Imagination and Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial (both with Gary Olson). She is currently working on a book on psychopathology in America.

Here’s what ADP’s own John Presley has to say about the book:

“Education as Civic Engagement should be read by anyone teaching the democratic skills of critical inquiry, collaborative work, and communication, and most certainly by those who prepare teachers for public education where these skills begin to appear in the curriculum. The ideas in this volume must be discussed in classes that touch on the structure, governance, fi nance, and history of American public higher education. We cannot go on without understanding the real situations we face.”
—John W. Presley, Illinois State University

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (September 4, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 113703369X
• ISBN-13: 978-1137033697

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART I: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

• Race, Rhetoric, and the Contest over Civic Education; S.Searls Giroux
• History as a Challenge to the Idea of the University; J.J.Williams
• Class Consciousness and the Junior College Movement: Creating a Docile Workforce; W.DeGenaro
• Hegemony and the Discourse of the Land Grant Movement: Historicizing as a Point of Departure; D.M.Brown

PART II: EMERGING TRENDS

• Marketing Excellence in Higher Education; C.Carter
• Capitalizing on Disaster: How the Political Right is Using Disaster to Privatize Public Schooling; K.J.Saltman

PART III: TOWARD A PEDAGOGY OF HOPE

• Deweyan Hopefulness in a Time of Despair; S.M.Fishman
• What’s Hope Got to Do With It?: Toward a Theory of Hope and Pedagogy; D.Jacobs
• Liberating ‘Liberatory’ Education, or What Do We Mean by ‘Liberty’ Anyway?; J.M.Ringer

Index
Contributors