Engaged Learning across the Curriculum: The Vertical Integration of Food for Thought.

This kind of vertical integration of engaged learning has considerable potential to deepen connections between higher education and K–12, and simultaneously to address issues of education and health THERE IS A RELATIVELY NEW and decidedly healthy educational movement emerging across the United States, from grade schools to high schools, from community colleges to graduate programs at the nation’s most prestigious universities. The movement goes by the name of “engaged learning.” One measure of its au courant status is the decision of the Association of American Colleges and Universities to devote the full winter 2005 issue of Peer Review, a quarterly journal on emerging trends in undergraduate education, to the topic. Yet while an increasing number of educators agree that “engaged learning” is superior to learning that is decontextualized or rote, what they actually mean by engaged varies widely. To help sort out the various usages, Stephen Bowen (2005, 4) has identified four ways of thinking about engagement: as “engagement with the learning process,” “engagement with the object of study,” “engagement with contexts,” and “engagement with the human condition.” His taxonomy, by distinguishing students’ engagement with different kinds of content and with process, has a clarifying heuristic purpose. As Bowen’s account of engagement shows, the nature and applicability of learning depend upon the student’s relationship to the subject matter. While the character of engaged learning as a social movement is new, the idea that students learn best when they are “engaged” is centuries old. John Dewey, the dean of a distinctly American philosophical tradition called pragmatism, founded the University of Chicago Laboratory School on the principle that students would learn best if they were engaged in the process of growing food in a garden, preparing it in the kitchen, and finally bringing it to the table for consumption. TROY DUSTER is director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University and Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California–Berkeley. ALICE WATERS, founder and director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, is a renowned chef and author of numerous books about food in relation to agriculture. Engaged Learning across the Curriculum