Engaging Minds: Evolving Learning and Teaching explores the diverse beliefs and practices that define the current landscape of formal education. The revised, updated, and expanded fourth edition of this groundbreaking introduction to current interdisciplinary studies of teaching and teacher education is structured around five prominent "frames" of formal education, together offering an overview of the historical and conceptual influences on educational practice:
- Early Formal Education – likely emerged alongside the creation of origin myths and the invention of symbol-based writing systems, presenting needs for individuals charged with communicating, interpreting, and maintaining such knowledge;
- Standardized Education – began to unfold in the 1600s, when public education was invented as a response to the cultural convulsions of industrialization, urbanization, and imperialism;
- Authentic Education – rose to prominence over the last century as researchers began to untangle the complexity of human cognition;
- Democratic Citizenship Education – fuelled by civil rights movements of the 1960s, with the realization that schools often contribute to (or at least help to perpetuate) inequities and injustices;
- Systemic Sustainability Education – an emerging trend, as schools and other cultural institutions find themselves out of step with the transition from a mechanization-focused industrialized society to an ecologically-minded and information-based society.
These frames serve as the foci of the five chapters of the book, each with three sections that deal, respectively, with history, epistemology, and pedagogy within the frame. Richly illustrated and designed, additional pedagogical features include multiple strategies to highlight and distinguish important vocabulary in the text, as well as suggestions for delving deeper into a given topic.
The fourth edition is also complemented by an online resource, learningdiscourses.com, that provides analyses of more than two thousand discourses on learning in education – including summaries and critiques, along with details on their authorship, their imagery, and their associated discourses.
