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Curriculum
Concerns about the fragmented nature of the undergraduate experience rightly raise questions about opportunities for synthesis: where and when are students asked to put the pieces together in order to better understand or solve important problems? Where and when are students encouraged to make links between their academic, personal, and community lives?
While no one is so naive as to imagine that an integrated curriculum can, by itself, produce integrative learning (which students must do for themselves), there is no doubt that the academic program can do more (or less) to encourage and help students develop the capacity to make and evaluate sound and useful connections between things that they encounter or experience in different courses, disciplines, and domains of life. To be sure, many students already get opportunities for synthesis in some of their courses; in "enriching educational experiences" such
as community service or volunteer work ( National Survey of Student Engagement); and in friendly curricular neighborhoods--lively interdisciplinary programs and centers, honors programs, and learning communities--often accompanied by special attention to academic advising, co-curricular activities, and other student services.
While these kinds of courses, enrichment experiences, and special programs increase the chance that students will receive encouragement and guidance for integrative learning, many colleges and universities are trying to be more intentional about building links into the regular curriculum and creating opportunities for all students to integrate their learning at multiple points throughout their college careers.
For example, campuses participating in the Integrative Learning Project have focused energy on key areas for curriculum integration. These include extended core curricula (Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts; Salve Regina University; State University of New York at Oswego); learning communities (College of San Mateo); cross-cutting skills, literacies, and learning outcomes (Carleton College; University of Charleston); first-year initiatives (LaGuardia Community College); middle-year initiatives (Portland State University); efforts to connect professional programs with general education (Philadelphia University); and better connections between study abroad programs and curriculum (Michigan State University). In addition, two of these institutions (La Guardia and Portland State) have elaborated the use of electronic portfolios as a way for students to integrate their own learning across courses.
Clearly, there are many ways to strengthen the integrative potential of an academic program. Which ones make the most sense for any particular institution depends on what is already happening on campus, as well as on the strength of its commitment to integrative learning as an educational goal.
Please cite as: Huber, Mary Taylor. Fostering Integrative Learning through the Curriculum. In "Integrative
Learning: Opportunities to Connect." Public Report of the
Integrative Learning Project sponsored by the Association of American
Colleges and Universities and The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. Edited by Mary Taylor Huber, Cheryl Brown,
Pat Hutchings, Richard Gale, Ross Miller, and Molly Breen. Stanford,
CA, January 2007. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/integrativelearning
 Curriculum
Essay by Huber
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Pedagogy
In thinking about integrative learning, the student belongs at the center: it is the student's development, capacity for making meaning, and skills and abilities to make coherent connections that matter most. But in the drive to help students develop integrative habits of mind through freshman seminars and capstone courses, study abroad, and community service, it is important to remember that the effectiveness of curricular innovations depends on the pedagogies that support them.
Many familiar pedagogies can serve the goal of integrative learning. Indeed, just about any format that allows groups of students to turn their attention to common problems, issues, themes, or tasks--the seminar, for example--can prompt integrative learning, given a topic of sufficient scope and interest to be elucidated by insights from different disciplines and perspectives. Experiential strategies, like service learning, study-abroad, or internships invite students to make connections between coursework and community, theory and practice. Innovative approaches using new media can relate objects or texts to contexts, and enable creative simulations. And there are "emergent" pedagogies, which respond to unanticipated events (like 9/11), student interests, and concerns.
All of these pedagogies (and more) share certain qualities. They acknowledge the realities of a changing world where disciplinary and curricular isolation are neither feasible nor desirable. They require (and develop) intellectual dexterity on the part of the teacher and the student, and the ability to speak to, if not from, a broad spectrum of knowledge and experience. They also embrace a commitment to creating time and space for dialogue and conflict. As a result, these pedagogies necessitate a more flexible approach to assessment, with well-designed assignments throughout the course, and multiple opportunities for structured reflection (as, for example, in portfolios) to help students take a more intentional approach to their own learning.
What is needed in teaching for integration, above any particular pedagogy, is an intentional approach. This means, first, designing courses with integrative learning in mind, and second, asking questions and gathering evidence about the specific challenges and dilemmas that students are facing as they develop their capacities as integrative learners. (See, for example, reports by the 2005 cohort of Carnegie Scholars in the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.) But it also requires paying close attention--as the ILP campuses are doing--to integrative learning when taking up issues of curricular alignment, program and campus-level assessment, and faculty development. If integrative learning is only as good as the pedagogy that supports it, then integrative teaching will only be as successful as the arrangements that make it possible and make it work.
Please cite as: Gale, Richard. Fostering Integrative Learning through Pedagogy. In "Integrative
Learning: Opportunities to Connect." Public Report of the
Integrative Learning Project sponsored by the Association of American
Colleges and Universities and The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. Edited by Mary Taylor Huber, Cheryl Brown,
Pat Hutchings, Richard Gale, Ross Miller, and Molly Breen. Stanford,
CA, January 2007. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/integrativelearning
Pedagogy
Essay by Gale
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Assessment
With all six regional and four major specialized accreditors calling for some form of integrative learning as an outcome of college, what has long been an aspiration for undergraduate education is now a common expectation. Campuses are discussing not whether integrative learning will be part of undergraduate learning, but rather how it will be defined and fostered, and--most puzzling of all--assessed.
Although assessment practices in higher education have advanced over the past two decades, neither standardized tests (such as ACT's Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency or ETS's Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress) nor surveys of student opinion, (like the National Survey of Student Engagement), directly assess students' integrative work. While some of the exercises used for the Collegiate Learning Assessment (a standardized qualitative exam) may require integrative action, the test provides scores only for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communication.
The ten campuses of the Integrative Learning Project have, over the past several years, developed a collection of innovative practices to assess--and foster--integrative learning. Given that integrative learning can be defined in a wide variety of ways, it is no surprise that these locally-invented assignments and assessments vary according to each campus's learning needs. One prime advantage of locally developed assignments and assessments is the enhanced likelihood that teaching and instruction will be aligned intentionally to produce quality learning and that the assessments will have good validity.
Valid assessment can arise from considering the whole planning-teaching-learning-assessment feedback cycle. Validity depends upon asking students to complete a task very similar to the experiences they had leading up to the assessment. Those experiences most often are class assignments. Assignments should logically flow from the goals set for student learning and allow sufficient time and opportunity to learn. Goals depend upon the definition of the outcome: complex outcomes, such as integrative learning, while often difficult to define in words, can also be defined operationally--i.e. by what one does when engaged in the outcome. So, by this logic, an assignment can represent nearly all the learning cycle--operationally defining the outcome, advancing learning toward goals established for the outcome, producing material for formative and summative assessment, and generating data to improve future teaching and learning. Indeed, assignments and assessments from the ten ILP campuses work in just this way.
Please
cite as: Miller, Ross. Fostering Integrative Learning through
Assessment. In "Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect." Public
Report of the Integrative Learning Project sponsored by the Association
of American Colleges and Universities and The Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching. Edited by Mary Taylor Huber,
Cheryl Brown, Pat Hutchings, Richard Gale, Ross Miller, and Molly
Breen. Stanford, CA, January 2007.. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/integrativelearning
Assessment
Essay by Miller
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Faculty Development
Campuses seriously committed to integrative learning must put in place not only relevant experiences for students, but opportunities for faculty to develop the capacity for--and a community around--integrative teaching.
Indeed, there are already many routes to this end. On a growing number of campuses, centers for teaching and learning offer workshops on classroom approaches that promote connection-making, such as collaborative learning, problem-based learning, service-learning, and the like. But serious commitment to integrative learning for students requires something that goes beyond what is usually meant by faculty development, and involves efforts to create a campus culture where a larger part of the academic community (faculty, staff, and students) are engaged in common integrative work.
For example, opportunities for faculty to develop more integrative approaches can be found in work on curriculum. On many campuses, general education reform brings the community together for tough but powerful conversations about the goals of undergraduate education and how students' experiences should (but often do not) add up. Working together on key moments of the curriculum (for example, freshman year, at the College of San Mateo) provides more focused opportunities for goal setting and design, while convening people to consider the effects of curriculum can provide valuable occasions to examine student work (for example, examining sophomore writing portfolios at Carleton College).
Special efforts, like SUNY Oswego's Catalyst Project, which explores students' perceptions of learning from freshman orientation to senior year, can also provide grist for lively discussion among faculty about how students integrate their experiences over time and what new interventions could strengthen those experiences.
Of course, integration is not simply a matter of capacity. One may have the skills and know-how to connect ideas but not the inclination. In this sense, integration is also a matter of culture and values, and both students and faculty are more likely to embrace integrative thinking if the campus is a place where one finds a lively exchange of ideas and perspectives about big ideas and issues that people care about--topics that call on people to contribute different perspectives and bring their varied expertise and experience to bear in ways that create new understandings.
Please cite as: Hutchings, Pat. Fostering Integrative Learning through Faculty Development. In "Integrative
Learning: Opportunities to Connect." Public Report of the
Integrative Learning Project sponsored by the Association of American
Colleges and Universities and The Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. Edited by Mary Taylor Huber, Cheryl Brown,
Pat Hutchings, Richard Gale, Ross Miller, and Molly Breen. Stanford,
CA, January 2007. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/integrativelearning
Faculty
Development Essay by Hutchings
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