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.

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.”