Large parts of this deep and inspiring book are not directly about teaching, whether effective or not; but the whole book is about creating the conditions under which effective teaching, and learning, can thrive.

The title is a reliable guide to the contents. Inside, it is divided into three unequal sections. The first, Historical Perspectives and Institutional Examples," is historical and analytical, providing some of the background to experimental higher education, beginning with the early part of this century, continuing through the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, and then focusing more particularly on Hampshire College and the Evergreen State College (at which both the editors work).

The third section is called "Taking Stock and Looking Ahead," and it includes useful chapters on interdisciplinary education and assessment and new directions for alternative education.

The richest and longest portion of the book, though, is the middle section, called "Powerful Pedagogies" and in turn divided into sections on "Learning Communities" and "Rethinking Teaching and Learning."

It is of course impossible to summarize the contents of this book, so I will simply highlight some of them. For those interested in Learning Communities as a new way to organized learning, all the chapters devoted to that educational reform are of interest. Barbara Leigh Smith details how a dedication to learning communities has changed higher education in institutions from community colleges to flagship universities in Washington State. Karen Kashmanian Oates and Laura Gaither discuss the incorporation of service-learning in learning communities. Grant Cornwell and Eve Stoddard's chapter "Toward an Interdisciplinary Epistemology: Faculty Culture and Institutional Change" grounds a discussion of interdisciplinary team teaching, and its effects on faculty development, in an account of their experience at St. Lawrence University.

The section on Powerful Pedagogies usefully begins with a chapter in which Bill Newell lists some: Integrative Learning, Interdisciplinary Study, Learning Communities (again), Collaborative Learning, Living/Learning, Experiential Learning, Study Abroad, Service-Learning, and Multicultural Learning. This little taxonomy can only add a paragraph or two on each subject; the following chapters put meat on some of these bones, including chapters on "Student-Active Science in Interdisciplinary Studies" and contributions on changing the organization to change the culture.

My favorite chapter is Donald Finkel's "Should the Teacher Know the Answer? Two Ways to Organize Interdisciplinary Study Around Inquiry." Finkel, another Evergreen faculty member who died in 1999--and the author of Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Heinemann, 2000), delves intelligently and honestly into the question he poses, explaining why (in his own experience) it is sometimes better for the teacher to know the answer, sometimes better to imitate Socrates (or at least what Socrates claimed to be doing), a practice which "puts the students' acts of knowing above the teachers' acts of teaching, and in some cases clearly involves the teacher as partner-in-inquiry with her students."

Finkel grounds his ideas about teaching in the works of John Dewey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and (here, at least) Socrates, whom he quotes on the value of inquiry-centered teaching:

I do not insist that my argument is right in all other respects, but I would contend at all costs both in word and deed as far as I could that we will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things that one does not know.

Finkel closes with an explanation of how his teaching changed over the years, an account which illuminates the individual and personal kind of self-reinvention which the creation of Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, St. John's and Evergreen constituted on the institutional level. Both kinds take courage and vision.

This is a rich and stimulating book and should be read by anybody interested in fruitful and progressive change--institutional or personal--in higher education.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville