2009 (01) February »
Integrative Learning and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Author: Julie Thompson Klein
In our last newsletter, we introduced a new topic for the 2008-2009 academic year – interdisciplinary studies (IDS) and integrative learning. The last issue focused on IDS, and this issue begins a parallel conversation about integrative learning. “Integrative learning” is the broader of the two concepts. It is an umbrella term for structures, strategies, and activities that bridge numerous divides, such as high school and college, general education and the major, introductory and advanced levels, theory and practice, experiences inside and outside the classroom, and disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. Both approaches advance the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by fostering connection-making. In their classic formation of SoTL, Ernest Boyer and Eugene Rice defined four forms of scholarship: discovery, integration, teaching, and application. “Integration” is synonymous with synthesizing and reintegrating knowledge, revealing new patterns of meaning and new relations between parts and wholes.
Since the late 1990s, calls for more integrative learning experiences have accelerated across higher education. In mapping the terrain of the movement, Mary Taylor Huber and Pat Hutchings call the capacity to make connections now “essential to the conduct of personal, professional, and civic life.” Integrative learning is not a new idea, though. The earliest modern uses of the term appeared in books on principles of psychology by Herbert Spencer (1855) and William James (1896) and in Alexis Bertrand’s theory of integrated instruction (1898). In the 1800s, integration was also linked with the Herbartian movement’s doctrine of correlation, which supplemented the doctrine of concentration by recognizing “natural relations” among subjects. The meaning of the term expanded in the twentieth century. Integrating disciplines and developing the “whole” person were primary values in the general education movement that arose in the opening decades of the century, and an important distinction also emerged. At a 1948 workshop sponsored by the Foundation for Integrative Education, participants further distinguished content integration — bridging separate subject areas — from process integration – promoting the interplay of an individual and an environment. They also distinguished integration as synthesizing accepted postulates from integrative building of new conceptual modes capable of producing a holistic experience (Ciccorico, 60-61; Taylor, 130l).
The emphasis on process means that integrative learning today does not occur at a single point or in a single form. In a Statement on Integrative Learning adopted in March 2004, the Association of American Colleges and Universities and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching emphasized that integration occurs “across courses, over time, and between campus and community life” (Huber & Hutchings, 13). Likewise, it occurs in different formats: in first-year experiences, learning communities, senior capstone seminars, student portfolios, and service-learning. The pedagogy varies in turn. The most prominent approaches include collaborative and experiential learning, living/learning communities, multicultural learning, inquiry-and discovery-based, and performance-based teaching. Strategies may also be combined. A course in a living/learning community, for example, might draw on several disciplines (interdisciplinary study), field experiences (service learning), cultures (multicultural learning), and perspectives (feminist theory and pedagogy). The essential commonality is drawing from multiple perspectives on a complex phenomenon for insights that can be integrated into a richer, more comprehensive understanding (Newell, 196-98).
The philosophy of integrative learning is informed by constructivist epistemology. When students are engaged in making meaning, application of knowledge takes precedence over mastery of facts alone. Students are immersed in acts of question posing, problem posing and solving, decision making, higher-order critical thinking, and reflexivity. The characteristics of an integrative thinker appear across contexts in a set of common abilities:
• asking meaningful questions about complex issues and problems
• locating multiple sources of knowledge, information, and perspectives
• comparing and contrasting them to reveal patterns and connections
• acknowledging and negotiating their contradictions
• creating an integrative framework and a more holistic understanding.
• understanding issues and positions contextually.
The relational skills that students gain also foster the ability to adapt knowledge in unexpected and changing contexts. The questions they will have and the problems they must solve as workers, parents, and citizens are not “in the book.” They will require integrative interdisciplinary thinking.
Over the remainder of the semester, we will explore the dynamics of both interdisciplinary and integrative approaches in a variety of disciplines and fields. If you have examples to share in this column, please contact Julie Thompson Klein at ad5820@wayne.edu.
References
Boyer, E.L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, Inc.
Ciccorico, E.W. (1970). “Integration” in the curriculum. Main Currents in Modern Thought, 27 (Nov-Dec): 60-62.
Huber, M. T. and Hutchings, P. (2004). Integrative learning. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Newell, W.H. (2001). Powerful pedagogies. Reinventing ourselves: interdisciplinary education, collaborative learning, and experimentation in higher education, ed. B.L. Smith and J. McCann, 196-211. Bolton, Massachusetts: Anker.
Taylor, A. (1969). Integrative principles and the educational process. Main Currents in Modern Thought, 25 (May/June): 126-33.
