Danielle L Lake

Remaking the Academy: The Potential and the Challenge of Transdisciplinary Collaborative Engagement

This chapter argues feminist pragmatist philosophy, transdisciplinarity, and the current movement towards public engagement offer a fruitful vision, pathway, and set of strategies for catalyzing collaborative teaching and learning within the academy. Given the authors’ commitment to a reflective praxis of engagement, it also documents our collective attempt to put these commitments into practice at our own institution. We conclude by highlighting the need for creative and collaborative advocacy efforts designed to not only reimagine the academy but also enact structural, procedural, and cultural changes.

Dewey Addams, and Beyond: A Context-Sensitive, Dialogue-Driven, Action-Based Pedagogy for Preparing Students to Confront Local Wicked Problems

Traditional, theoretical pedagogical practices based in disciplinary expertise generally fail to prepare students for high-stakes, public problems. In contrast, “Wicked Problems of Sustainability” is an undergraduate course designed to provide students with the opportunity to redress complex, local problems through an experiential, community-engaged model. By implementing pedagogy developed through the integration of a feminist pragmatist framework with the literature on wicked problems, this course offers opportunities to impact real problems, develop skills, and foster virtues necessary for tackling public problems. Given the value of this work, but also the difficulties, this article highlights the potential pitfalls of community work on wicked problems in addition to providing a series of recommendations for a pragmatic, community-based, experiential pedagogy in a “wicked” world.

Engaging Deweyan Ethics in Health Care: Leonard Fleck's Rational Democratic Deliberation

While the U.S. health care system is failing to serve many of its citizens, agreeing on what is wrong as well as on how to fix the system seems impossibly optimistic. Leonard Fleck attempts to do just this—to diagnose the problems and to address these problems through dialogue. Dewey’s philosophy supports the direction of Fleck’s work, but it also highlights serious problems with this argument. And when far less rich countries are able to provide better care to all their citizens for far less, we have a system in need of a deliberative process that works.