Outcomes of Engaged Education: From Transfer to Transformation
By Linda Flower
Copy edited by Don Donahue. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
Revealing the impressive unseen outcomes community engaged and intellectually challenging classes can have for college students, Outcomes of Engaged Education combines case studies with introductions to informal methods for tracking how students transfer, transform, and apply such learning to their lives as well as how to engage them in this collaborative inquiry. Drawing on 20 years of data to document the significant outcomes such experiences have had for college students in their lives—up to ten years later—Linda Flower reveals a critical distinction between transfer and the transformation of knowledge. Each chapter embeds its methods in a set of case studies modeling the methods and reflecting on the findings emerging from its use. The result is a book that considers how we as teachers can draw our students into this inquiry and help them develop a more articulate awareness of their experiential knowledge, choices, and agency.
Table of Contents
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Chapter 1. Why Should Assessment Matter?
Chapter 2. Creating Personal Outcomes
Chapter 3. Outcomes with a Public Face
Chapter 4. Interrogating Hidden Frames as a Path to Change
Chapter 5. Putting Transformation to Work
Chapter 6. Teaching for Transformation
Praise for the Book
Linda Flower offers us an impressive array of research methods and analytical lenses to make visible outcomes from community engaged learning that might well go unnoticed and thus undervalued without her careful tracking. Indeed, she reframes our thinking on such terms as “transfer of knowledge” and “metacognition” with her characteristic commitment to social justice and conjoint activity. She remains one of literacy education’s most indispensable thinkers.
– Eli C. Goldblatt, Temple University
Scholars have been called to bring the transformative capacities of the humanities to life for and with students—on terms that matter to them as they chart lives different from our own and in the face of pressing challenges, some of which contemporary educators may not be able fully to fathom. Outcomes of Engaged Education: From Transfer to Transformation is a brilliant case for the impact that a publicly engaged rhetorical education has in the lives of students. The case studies in the book dramatize social activity that raises significant challenges—the very grist from which more socially just practices can emerge. People used their experience to solve problems, to see and to deal with contradictions, usually to successful endings. I was lucky enough to be privy to an unpublished manuscript of this book which I shared with my own students. At my school, undergraduate, master’s-level and Ph.D. students alike are choosing Flower’s book as a companion for undertaking the rhetorical work they most value, transforming what they’ve done before into what they need to do now, and developing their own critical metacognitive frameworks for doing so again.
– Elenore Long. Arizona State University
About the Author
Linda Flower is Professor Emerita of English at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters in edited collections as well as the books Problem-Solving Strategies for Writing in College and Community, The Construction of Negotiated Meaning, and Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. She is the recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English James Squire Award, which honors “outstanding service, not only to the stature and development of NCTE and the discipline which it represents, but also to the profession of education as a whole, internationally as well as nationally.”
Publication Information: Flower, Linda. (2024). Outcomes of Engaged Education: From Transfer to Transformation. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2024.2388
Digital Publication Date: August 16, 2024
Print Publication Date: TBD
ISBN: 978-1-64215-238-8 (PDF) | 978-1-64215-239-5 (ePub) | 978-1-64642-688-1 (pbk.)
DOI: 10.37514/PRA-B.2024.2388
Contact Information:
Linda Flower: lf54@andrew.cmu.edu
Practices & Possibilities
Series Editors: Aimee McClure, Clarke University; Kelly Ritter, Georgia Institute of Technology; Aleashia Walton, University of Cincinnati; and Jagadish Paudel, University of Texas at El Paso
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). It will also be available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado.
Copyright © 2024 Linda Flower. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. 152 pages, with notes, illustrations, bibliography, and index. This book will be available in print from University Press of Colorado as well as from any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. Available in digital formats for no charge on this page at the WAC Clearinghouse. You may view this book. You may print personal copies of this book. You may link to this page. You may not reproduce this book on another website. For permission requests and other questions, such as creating a translation, please contact the copyright holder.