Preparing the books to read every day is enjoyable for many people. However, there are still many people who also don't like reading. This is a problem. But, when you can support others to start reading, it will be better. One of the books that can be recommended for new readers is experience and education. This book is not kind of difficult book to read. It can be read and understand by the new readers.

Experience and Education.

Where's the Learning in Service-Learning?

Henry A. Giroux Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 20143Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyI was a little disappointed by Henry A. Giroux's most recent book, and I heartily recommend it.Let me explain.Henry A. Giroux is a working-class kid from the United States of America. He got into college on a basketball scholarship. He is probably the most prolific author among those educators that align themselves with what's called "critical pedagogy." He could justifiably claim the mantle of Paulo Freire. He holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario and is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. His curriculum vitae could pass for a small town's telephone book. He is 70-years-old. He looks more than half but not quite three-quarters of his age. He looks like he'd still make a formidable point guard. He still has the spirit of a working- class kid from the United States of America.Giroux has plenty of detractors. He has the air of a self-promoter. He can be admired for his stage presence in any of the many performances he gives as a certified "public intellectual," but his critics might label his performances no more than a few hyperbolic shorts of demagoguery. He can also be very, very funny.Education is not the objective pursuit and dissemination of value-free knowledge and it is certainly not or (rather ought not to be) an anaesthetizing and depoliticizing process in which marketable "skill sets" are dispensed to uncritical student "customers."Most obviously, Henry A. Giroux can be dismissed as an "ideologue." I know a number of educational administrators who would do and have done everything they could to squelch an invitation for him to speak on campus. They are afraid of him. Worse, I know an enormous number of educational administrators who have never even heard of him-a testament only to the vast gap between them and anything important going on in education and the academic world.I have been privileged to share some air with him at a number of public lectures and I have had the opportunity to speak with him briefly on occasion. He would not, I think, publicly or privately reject the labels that others attempt to stick on him. It's not worth the trouble. He is, by choice, a very busy man. He will talk to any audience worth his time-at professional conferences, faculty meetings, trade union gatherings or any others with a spark of life and a sense of outrage. When he does talk, they will leave well served and all the better for the experience. He is political and he is political for the very reason that he can't help it. None of us can.Giroux has no interest in creating a certified population of supine citizens, compliant consumers and efficient producers. He presses for critical education that is intended to emancipate people from the ideological constraints...From Henry Giroux's perspective, education from pre-school to post-graduate studies is under attack. It is being eviscerated by the same forces that dominate the toxic wasteland of popular entertainment, the "school-to-prison pipeline" that siphons off discontent in the racialized urban American centres, that conduct perpetual foreign wars and that ruthlessly exploit people regardless of age, gender and colour.It is one of Henry Giroux's mantras that education is not the objective pursuit and dissemination of value-free knowledge and it is certainly not or (rather ought not to be) an anaesthetizing and depoliticizing process in which marketable "skill sets" are dispensed to uncritical student "customers" who are desperate to find employment in postmodern economies where satisfying, secure and well-paying jobs are quickly disappearing where they have not already vanished.In the alternative, Giroux believes that the educational project is many things, but it is at least this: regardless of whether students are studying architecture or zoology, engineering, economics, ethics or English literature, there is always a moral and a political essence to the enterprise. …

Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education

Service-learning in theory and practice: The future of community engagement in higher education. Dan W. Butin. (2010). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 174 pp. (ISBN 9780230622517).Many organizations support ever increasing numbers of service-learning initiatives in colleges and universities across the continent (Hollander, 2010), making an examination of such initiatives of particular interest to Canadian scholars involved in comparative and international research. Dan Butin maintains that a lack of one unitary model for service-learning creates difficulties for integration into traditional conventions of higher education. For this reason Butin establishes limits and possibilities for service-learning, explores philosophical shifts needed for an institutionalizing of service-learning in higher education and offers suggestions for an attainable future for service-learning.Following an informational foreword by Elizabeth Hollander and an impassioned preface by the author, Butin demonstrates the limitations and potential of service-learning in higher education. Throughout Chapter 1 Butin attempts to define and conceptualize service-learning from multiple perspectives, and tenders technical, cultural, political and antifoundational typologies. Chapter 2 explores the pedagogical, political, and institutional limits of servicelearning and the impediment that these limits pose to its institutional longevity. In Chapter 3 Butin explains how external and internal limitations of service-learning represent powerful and transformative possibilities in higher education.Chapter 4 examines the disciplining of service-learning as an intellectual movement comparable to women's studies. While Chapter 5 explores how some programs are already institutionalizing service-learning through recognized certificates, minors, and majors. Butin utilizes Chapter 6 to take the reader through an examination of other disciplines that provide additional insights into the evolution and incorporation of community engagement within the academy.Butin persuades service-learning scholars and practitioners to reexamine "what they do and how they do it" since he believes that service-learning and community engagement should be no more novel or noteworthy than any other scholarly task (126). Chapter 7 helps faculty to view community engagement as another means of being a good scholar through the production and dissemination of knowledge and the search for truth. While Chapter 8 places servicelearning and community engagement within the larger picture of the major contemporary trends and tensions in higher education.A solid and logical structure is provided by Dan Butin which aids the reader since his arguments can sometimes be rather complex. This book should not be a starting point for scholars new to the field of service-learning since it is not concerned with the fundamentals of community-engaged learning models but it does offer insights useful to those concerned with the future of such programs in higher education. Butin focuses on defining and conceptualizing service-learning in higher education and the place it occupies within the sphere of academia.Hironimus-Wendt & Lovell-Troy state, "[i]ndeed some of our own colleagues have questioned the strong emphasis on a 'transformative' role ascribed to service learning, particularly regarding community change" and suggest a "more broadly theoretical foundation for service learning is warranted in order to encourage other educators to consider its adoption and implementation" (1999, p. 363). To support this suggestion, they reference the work of John Dewy and George Herbert Mead who are considered by some to be the originators of the servicelearning concept, demonstrating that even in the preliminary stages, during the early 1900s, the leading experts held very different beliefs as to the exact role that experiential education could play in student development.This publication is suitable for a scholarly audience already familiar with service learning, and are interested in a deeper examination, classification and possible future evolution of the phenomenon. …

Service-Learning in Theory and Practice: The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education

Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. Oscar Lewis

In this essay, we examine the emerging discipline of comparative theology as a valuable window into the problematic of the return of religion and theology after "religion." The first section discusses recent historical critiques of comparative religion, focusing particularly on its emergence from a late nineteenth-century discourse that was also called "comparative theology." This critique focuses attention on the unacknowledged normative commitments implicit in the category of "religion" as an object of scientific study. The second section presents the new comparative theology as one of several constructive responses to the dilemma, with this critical difference: whereas the recognition of normative commitment remains a methodological problem for most scholars in religious studies, it belongs to the very nature of the comparative theological project. Insofar as it encourages wider accountability and authentic vulnerability in its comparative practice, we argue, the new comparative theology represents both a way past the legacy of liberal universalism and a useful model for comparative enquiry in theology and religious studies alike.

The Return of Comparative Theology

Educational theorist Richard Kiely highlights the central importance of “high intensity dissonance” in successful international service-learning. This essay applies Kiely's model of dissonance and transformative learning to Intercordia, an international service-learning program offered at the University of St. Michael's College and the University of Toronto, in partnership with the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Intercordia Canada. By placing its students in situations of significant vulnerability and weakness, the Intercordia program attempts to problematize familiar assumptions about the otherness of oppressed persons and thereby to encourage an authentic sense of belonging across boundaries of difference. The results, as reported by participants in the program, are quite profound. At the same time, the program design invites critical questions about how, and to what extent, such transformative experiences of dissonance should be scripted for students as an expected and desired result of their international service.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-9647.2009.00569.x

Weakness, Belonging, and the Intercordia Experience: The Logic and Limits of Dissonance as a Transformative Learning Tool

Teaching Civic Engagement

Tomoko Masuzawa and a number of other contemporary scholars have recently problematized the categories of “religion” and “world religions” and, in some cases, called for its abandonment altogether as a discipline of scholarly study. In this collaborative essay, we respond to this critique by highlighting three attempts to teach world religions without teaching “world religions.” That is, we attempt to promote student engagement with the empirical study of a plurality of religious traditions without engaging in the rhetoric of pluralism or the reification of the category “religion.” The first two essays focus on topical courses taught at the undergraduate level in self-consciously Christian settings: the online course “Women and Religion” at Georgian Court University and the service-learning course “Interreligious Dialogue and Practice” at St. Michael's College, in the University of Toronto. The final essay discusses the integration of texts and traditions from diverse traditions into the graduate theology curriculum more broadly, in this case at Loyola Marymount University. Such confessional settings can, we suggest, offer particularly suitable – if somewhat counter-intuitive – contexts for bringing the otherwise covert agendas of the world religions discourse to light and subjecting them to a searching inquiry in the religion classroom.

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Within the context of an increasing interest in forms of work-integrated learning (WIL) among governments and institutions of higher education, this essay explores the relation between WIL and community-engaged learning (CEL) in order to argue that the structural and self-critique apparent in much CEL scholarship can serve as a model to WIL scholars and practitioners. CEL has undergone a rigorous process of self-examination in recent years, a process that has encouraged its advocates to think carefully about their core assumptions, appropriate learning objectives, and best practices in the field. In this way, we argue, whether or not CEL is classified as a form of WIL, it can serve to defamiliarize many of WIL’s assumptions and to invite self-reflection in the field as a whole. In the first half of the essay, we provide background for the conversation, first in the Canadian context, and then in the broader scholarship of CEL. In the second half, we offer three case studies that illustrate both the distinctive characteristics of CEL and, in the last case, how these characteristics might strengthen the practice of traditional WIL.

/pdf/beyond-employability-defamiliarizing-work-integrated-2wj2yqftvy.pdf

Reid B. Locklin

Papers

The Return of Comparative Theology

Weakness, Belonging, and the Intercordia Experience: The Logic and Limits of Dissonance as a Transformative Learning Tool

Teaching Civic Engagement

Teaching World Religions without Teaching “World Religions”

Beyond Employability: Defamiliarizing Work-Integrated Learning with Community-Engaged Learning