Institutional Mission(s) and Engaged Learning

Abstract

Up to this point, we have been considering two large categories of challenges and possibilities faced by academics as they try to incorporate various forms of engaged learning into their programs: the curricular, having to do the with nature of knowledge used and valued in and out of college classrooms; and the pedagogical, having to do with the practices through which people encounter, engage, and produce knowledge—that is, through which they learn—in those different arenas. As we have seen, both in the literature on situated cognition and in the stories about actual interns, the intersection of knowledge-use inside and outside the academy presents enormous challenges and opportunities on both of those fronts. Even when people in the “academic” and “practical” worlds (the quotation marks reflect the highly problematic meanings of those commonsense concepts) are employing similar terms—say, gentrification—but especially when their discourses appear not to overlap, the substantial differences between the two knowledge domains highlight the question of whether they can be aligned and coordinated in productive ways. Similarly, the differences between the pedagogical dynamics of the two settings force us to consider whether and how faculty and students can devise methods to ensure that they both learn more than they would by virtue of mere out-of-school experience.