Arguments for Learning: An Intellectual History of the College of Education at the University of Illinois

Almost every educational idea worth a thought has been considered at the University of Illinois, and anything worth trying has been tested. In this history of ideas, Bill Cope and Walter Feinberg chronicle the intellectual lives of education thinkers at the university while tracking the development of educational ideas and practices in general.

Cope and Feinberg draw on conversations, narratives, and archival research that reveal how different generations explored their role in defining and carrying out the College’s multifaceted mission. Their account raises critical questions about the character of learning, the aims of teaching, and the nature of teaching as a profession. At the same time, the authors address issues that range from the role of schools in fostering individual and collective identity to the introduction of computer-mediated and online learning. Cope and Feinberg examine changes in self-understanding about fundamental ideas and chart how the College evolved from its original narrow mission of training children’s schoolteachers to embracing global perspectives.

A wide-ranging portrait of an institution, Arguments for Learning uses the School of Education to tell the stories of thinkers dedicated to the idea that education can change the world for the better.

Bill Cope is a professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is coauthor of Making Sense: Reference, Agency, and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning and coeditor of e-Learning Ecologies: Principles for New Learning and Assessment. Walter Feinberg is the Charles Dun Hardie Professor Emeritus of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Educating for Democracy and Dewey and Education.