Integrative Learning

International research and practice

Daniel Blackshields, James Cronin, Bettie Higgs, Shane Kilcommins, Marian McCarthy, Anthony Ryan, Daniel Blackshields, James Cronin, Bettie Higgs, Shane Kilcommins, Marian McCarthy, Anthony Ryan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415711074
• eBook ISBN: 9781134648573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Current teaching, learning and assessment practices can lead students to believe that courses within a programme are self-sufficient and separate. Integrative Learning explores this issue, and considers how intentional learning helps students become integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information, and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions.

Written by international contributors who engaged reflectively with their teaching and their students' learning, the book seeks to develop a shared language of integrative learning, encouraging students to adapt skills learned in one situation to problems encountered in another, and make autonomous connections across courses, between experiences, and throughout their lives. More informed teachers can help students develop the necessary attributes for intentional learning, which include having a sense of purpose, fitting fragmentary information into a 'learning framework', understanding something of their own learning processes, asking probing questions, reflecting on their own choices, and knowing when to ask for help.

Integrative Learning draws on international research and vast studies to provide the reader with the resources to ensure access to a unified learning experience. The book discusses conceptual and technical tools necessary for facilitating integrative learning across a range of disciplines as well as providing learning pedagogies and considers integrative learning in the context of the relevance of higher education in the complexity and uncertainty of the 21st century. It will appeal to academics and researchers in the field of higher education, as well as those generating higher education curriculums.

Chapter 1

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Integrative learning in US higher education

Where we’ve been; where we’re going

Mary Taylor Huber

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Introduction

Integrative learning is alive and well in US higher education reform. It’s true that in the United States, as elsewhere, financial and market pressures are contributing to policies that shift resources and attention away from the traditional purposes and fields of liberal education.¹ But it’s hard to find a recent report or strategic plan from a learned society or higher education association that does not push back—and it’s not just talk. Despite the difficulties of working against the institutional grain, a series of reform initiatives over the past decade have heightened attention to integrative learning as a goal to be formally planned for and intentionally taught. The results are evident on campuses across the country, where opportunities for students to integrate their learning have been increased and strengthened.

This is not to say that integrative learning is yet the norm for undergraduates in US colleges and universities. Definitional difficulties make progress hard to measure; institutional logics continue to create bounded experiences in need of integration. And, of course, it’s an ongoing challenge to sustain existing opportunities for integration and extend them to more students. Even the strongest advocates would admit that there’s a long way to go.

This chapter provides a historical view of the recent movement to support integrative learning in the United States. In particular, I’ll look at three initiatives that have helped develop the theory and practice of integrative learning over the past decade. The Integrative Learning Project, sponsored by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), shined a spotlight on institutional efforts to support integrative learning. The work of fellows in the Carnegie Foundation’s Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) allowed us to see what integrative learning at the classroom level looks like. And finally, AAC&U’s initiative on Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) is addressing the continuing challenges of expanding access to opportunities for integrative learning and improving their quality.

Integrative learning has become central to the effort at US colleges and universities to rethink and redesign liberal education for the twenty-first century, and it’s likely that the pedagogical and technological changes we are experiencing now in higher education will make it even more urgent—and challenging—to foster integrative learning in the years to come.

Why now?

But first, let’s pause to ask why colleges and universities have begun paying so much attention to integrative learning. After all, educators have long endorsed its value, and it is certainly implicit, if not explicit, in most expressions of what it means to be an educated person. In their recent book, The Heart of Higher Education, Palmer and Zajonc (2010: p. 1) cite Wendell Berry’s (1987) eloquent statement of this ideal:

What universities are mandated to make or help to make is human beings in the fullest sense of those words—not just trained workers or knowledgeable citizens but responsible heirs and members of human culture … Underlying the ideas of a university—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being.

(p. 77)

This may be too strongly worded for some people’s taste, but many would accept Berry’s core conviction that, in serious liberal education, the sum is worth more than its parts.

This aspiration has been written into the curricula for US higher education from its beginning in the colonial colleges of the mid-seventeenth century and has survived the successive shocks of secularization, specialization, and massification. Undergraduate study took modern form in the early twentieth century, when the old curriculum followed by all students was replaced by the elective system, tamed by requirements for breadth (“general education”) and depth (the “major”).² The rationales that curriculum committees use to set these requirements have traditionally articulated each institution’s official approach to integration (at least as far as academic coherence is concerned). Until recently, however, campuses have simply assumed that bright students would “get it” and “pull the pieces of their education together as they moved through their studies” (Huber & Hutchings, 2004: p. 5).

Today, that no longer seems sufficient. What’s new is the conviction that colleges and universities should make integrative learning an explicit goal, and do what they can through the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment to help all students—not just the top ones, not just the ones in honors programs, and not just the ones studying the liberal arts and sciences—realize its importance, gain the needed skills, and have opportunities to practice and develop it as a formal part of their college experience.

The reasons are not hard to understand. Globalization and technology are widely credited with increasing the pace and complexity of personal, civic, and economic life, placing a premium on our capacities for lifelong learning, practical reason, and integrative thought.³ Answers for the multi-layered nature of today’s social and environmental issues are not likely to be found within a single discipline, company, or government office. To successfully address such challenges, students will need to be able to think creatively and work with others across intellectual, institutional, and international boundaries. This is true within the academy as well, where new areas of knowledge and know-how are emerging through cross-disciplinary exchange and transforming the core of the contributing fields. “Biology in the 21st century,” one recent report pronounced, “requires that undergraduates learn how to integrate concepts across levels of organization and complexity and to synthesize and analyze information that connects conceptual domains” (American Academy for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], 2011: p. ix). Similar statements can be found in virtually every field.

What all this means is that the traditional signs of quality in US undergraduate education—the breadth provided by general education and the depth provided by the major—are no longer enough. Based on AAC&U’s (2002) influential analysis of the gap between the undergraduate education students usually get and what they are likely to need, the Association’s president Carol Schneider (2004) wrote that educators today

are taking seriously the fragmentation of knowledge, not just in their courses, but through the knowledge explosion in the world around us. Many of the most interesting educational innovations [in higher education] are clearly intended to teach students what we might call the new liberal art of integration.

(p. 7)

Institutional innovation: the Integrative Learning Project

In January 2003, Carol Schneider of AAC&U and Lee Shulman, then president of The Carnegie Foundation, announced that the two organizations had agreed to design a 3-year-long project to support, explore, and learn from what colleges and universities were already doing to create and strengthen opportunities for students to gain experience in integrative learning. We issued a call for campus participation in summer 2003, looking for ten institutions that had already made significant progress in this area, and who wished to take the next steps in improving their integrative learning strategies.

Very little money was available to the participants—only US$5,000 over 3 years. So, we were surprised at the result of our call: 139 campuses applied, providing a pool of applications that revealed widespread interest in designing campus programs to help students connect skills and knowledge within and across their academic and nonacademic experiences (DeZure, Babb & Waldmann, 2005). Certainly, that response suggested that “integrative learning” was an appealing idea to educators across the country. Indeed, the ten campuses we selected came from the full spectrum of institutional types—public and private, secular and faith-based, doctoral and research universities, master’s universities and colleges, baccalaureate colleges, community colleges (offering 2-year certificates and degrees), and even a specialized technical institution. And the work they proposed represented pretty well the larger set of projects represented in our applicant pool (see Huber et al., 2005, 2007a).

Curriculum development figured in many of these projects, with efforts to weave integrative learning experiences into first-year programs and/or middle and upper-level capstone courses or projects (Philadelphia University; Portland State University; Salve Regina University; the State University of New York at Oswego; and the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts). Assessment was also a common theme, with one college engaged in a study to discover how faculty were defining and teaching transferable, crosscutting skills and literacies across the whole curriculum (Carleton College); another focused on enhancing the design of integrative learning assignments to align with their liberal learning outcomes (University of Charleston); and two were developing e-portfolios of student work as ways of documenting students’ progress as integrative learners (Portland State University, LaGuardia Community College).

These same e-portfolios, of course, are also pedagogies—assignments, in effect, that ask for and facilitate students’ efforts at integration, and as such, they joined two other projects focused on course and program design: strengthening a study-abroad program’s connections with integrative learning goals (Michigan State University), and expanding a learning communities program to promote shared knowing among students and faculty in different fields (College of San Mateo). Keep in mind that these projects were only the cutting edge; all of these campuses had a history of more or less successful efforts to redesign curricula, pedagogy, assessment, and faculty development with integrative learning in mind.

There’s an all-over-the-map quality to these initiatives that speaks clearly to the pervasive fragmentation of the college experience for many students in US colleges and universities. With time typically split between filling requirements for general education, elective courses, the major, a variety of cocurricular activities, and the world beyond campus, the situation is even worse for the increasing numbers of students working their way through college or taking courses at two or more institutions over their college careers (“swirling”). The initiatives proposed by participants in the Integrative Learning Project point to the many ways that campuses can find to structure and support integrative learning as a response and antidote to the many disconnects experienced by college students.

But the pervasiveness of the problem and consequent variety of interventions is also a challenge for those seeking clarity about the term “integrative learning” itself. Indeed, in preparation for this project, Pat Hutchings and I wrote an early position paper on the theme, followed by a joint statement by AAC&U and Carnegie (Huber & Hutchings, 2004). Integration, we concluded, meant connecting learning across subjects, between contexts, and over time. But the particular connections students might make, while important for their own sake, are also meant to build students’ capacities and dispositions to integrate learning well beyond college—“to develop habits of mind that prepare them to make informed judgments in the conduct of personal, professional, and civic life” (AAC&U & CFAT, 2004).

In other words, and our campuses’ projects supported this, integrative learning experiences could be designed to help students develop the inclination and skills (the “habit”) to put together whatever educational structures and cultural conventions had silenced or conspired to keep apart—within and across different fields, theory and practice, liberal and professional studies, academics and community life, cognitive and affective dimensions of learning, metacognitive awareness—indeed, for some educators (as we soon found out), integrative learning referred most readily to connections between intellectual and spiritual life (see also Torosyan, 2010: p. 130). It may sound complicated, but the basic idea isn’t really that hard. As one student in a combined Math and English learning community at one of our participating community colleges observed, “it’s about tying things together that don’t seem obvious.”

But what does it take to help students tie apparently disparate things together? Can we recognize it when they do? The answer lies not just in programs that transcend, cut across, or link different college experiences, but within the very heart of those experiences themselves.

Classroom interventions: the CASTL

To look more deeply into the students’ classroom experience, I turn to a second project, the national fellowship program of the CASTL, which ran concurrently with the Integrative Learning Project. For the 2005–2006 cohort, we accepted 21 faculty members who were engaged in classroom research on strategies they’d devised to foster integrative learning among their students.⁴ These scholars came together formally three times: for a 10-day residency at the beginning and end of their fellowship year, and a 3-day residency in the middle. We used plenaries to hash out common themes. But much of the work was done in smaller working groups, where participants honed research questions, explored methods for making students’ learning visible, enriched reading lists, and generally supported each other’s efforts to make sense and go public with what they were learning.

To get a sense of what the scholarship of integrative teaching and learning looks like, consider the seven scholars in the group that I facilitated with Richard Gale (CASTL’s director at the time). David Geelan, an education professor (now at Griffith University in Australia), was examining how to help beginning science teachers make better use of web-based teaching resources. Rona Halualani, from San Jose State University, was exploring the use of a team approach to helping students grapple with diversity in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Integrative learning in US higher education: where we've been; where we're going
• 2 Integrative learning for creative teaching: planning eportfolios for academic development in higher education
• 3 Problem-based learning: an integrative approach to the cultivation of person-centeredness, empathy, and compassion
• 4 Integrative learning in a campaigns and elections class
• 5 Yes, and ...: cultivating the art of conversation through improvisational classroom experiences
• 6 Learning agreements: road maps to integrative learning
• 7 Silence as presence: integrating meta-cognitive practices in visual studies
• 8 Making connections: the use of ethnographic fieldwork to facilitate a model of integrative learning
• 9 Integrative learning: the first year seminar
• 10 Developing the self in economics: the role of developmental space in an integrated undergraduate education
• 11 Capstone courses as a vehicle for integrative learning
• 12 Integrated team teaching and learning frameworks: developing applied learning environments for teacher professional development
• 13 The drama workshop as a catalyst for integrative learning
• 14 The course portfolio as a catalyst for integrative learning
• 15 Interdisciplinary science: integrative learning in first-year undergraduate science
• 16 Learning beyond cognition: embodying integration from seminar to the stage
• 17 Building bridges to learning communities
• 18 Digital Humanities and integrative learning
• 19 Connection making through community-based research: an action research approach to enhancing community engagement activities
• 20 Learning by doing: a practicum for head and neck cancer prevention
• 21 Situating integrative learning in medical education through a communities of practice lens
• 22 Joining the dots: the curriculum vitae as an integrative learning tool
• Conclusion
• Index