There is a persistent
concern that programming is fragmented and students
are offered an array of opportunities with relatively
little and inconsistent guidance in availing themselves
of the offerings or reflecting on the total experience
which should be "more than the sum of its parts."
--proposal to the Integrative Learning Project
In the summer of 2003, the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching and the Association of American
Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) issued a call
for campus participation in a new national project to
investigate and promote integrative learning in undergraduate
education, Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect.
While only ten campuses could be selected for this three-year
effort, the pool of 139 applications revealed widespread
progress and significant challenges in meeting integrative
learning goals. Helping students connect skills and
knowledge within and across their academic and nonacademic
experiences is a priority on many campuses, and a survey
of the proposed projects provides a window into the
current state of integrative learning nationally.
Using the responses to the call's criteria--a
description of institutional context and current accomplishments
in integrative programming, a proposed project, and
questions to be answered by the work--the three
authors of this paper developed a protocol to collect
relevant information and analyze results. In this article
we highlight areas that campuses mentioned most frequently
for piloting or implementation, note other areas less
frequently mentioned, and examine important themes and
practices that emerged from the analysis.
Surveying the Terrain
The process of using proposals to analyze institutional
efforts to support integrative learning has both benefits
and limitations. Although the proposals are only five
pages long and respond to specific criteria in the call,
they are detailed enough to suggest the emergent nature
of this work. For instance, we found that campuses do
not use the language of integration consistently; the
phrase "integrative learning" has limited
common meaning. Even familiar concepts like learning
community, capstone, first-year experience, general
education, interdisciplinary (or, variously, cross-disciplinary,
multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary) courses or
studies have differing applications, and we had to be
flexible in categorizing project information.
Nevertheless, major lines of work are taking shape
in the name of integrative learning, and the protocol
allowed us to aggregate the data and observe themes
across institutions in a meaningful way. With some caution
about overstating findings, this survey could serve
as a baseline for contributions to larger efforts to
build coherent programs of integrated undergraduate
experiences in classrooms, across disciplines, and on
and off campuses.
The protocol lists twenty-four primary and secondary
focal points for campus projects, and single projects
often had multiple foci. For example, a campus might
propose assessment and faculty development as part of
a new first-year learning community. The areas of activity
with highest combined totals are assessment (70 percent),
faculty development (63 percent), curriculum development
(37 percent), capstones and first-year experiences (each
30 percent), student self-assessment and portfolios
(29 percent), civic engagement (18 percent), and learning
communities (16 percent). Interdisciplinary studies
and courses, advising, middle years and bridging programs,
honors programs, and programs for transfer students
are identified in fewer than ten proposals.
Assessment is the focus for 70 percent of the projects.
The range of activity varies greatly, but involves some
measurement of student learning, skills and attitudes,
and program outcomes; the development of rubrics; use
of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement;
and portfolios. In fact, nearly 30 percent of proposals
center on student, faculty, and program portfolios,
and of those over half are e-portfolios. Many campuses
report they were already experimenting with portfolios,
electronic or otherwise, in some part of the curriculum.
At the same time, many lament the lack of models for
reliably measuring how well students integrate their
learning.
Sixty-three percent of proposals identify faculty development
as a project focus. As one campus states, "Faculty
have difficulty moving outside their own disciplines."
Another campus acknowledges the challenge of teaching
for integrative learning and the consequent need for
work with faculty: "Our students find it hard
to make integrative connections unless the faculty can
model integrative thinking in the ways in which they
teach their classes."
Thirty-seven percent of campuses propose work that
could be categorized primarily as curriculum development.
Institutions are seeking coherence and synthesis, for
example, within the disciplines, between general education
and the major or preprofessional studies, in linking
and bridging first-year experiences and capstones, and
the like. Indeed, 21 percent focus on the integration
of disciplinary course work with general education courses.
Separate from but overlapping with the focus on curriculum
development are first-year and capstone experiences--both
totaling about 30 percent of the projects. More than
half already use one or both, and a quarter of the proposals
focus on revising and expanding them. Capstones, in
particular, are cited as promising sites for determining
whether--and for ensuring that--students integrate
their learning in the general or core curriculum with
learning in their major. Interestingly, only 3 percent
of applicants submitted proposals for the sophomore
or junior years, specifically middle-year and bridging
programs.
One might envision integrative learning being strengthened
through diversity and multicultural efforts, undergraduate
research, independent study, global/international efforts,
and career development. However, these are rarely mentioned
as a project focus, although they are identified among
existing institutional activities.
Also interesting is the preponderance of applications
from doctoral/research and master's colleges and universities
(58 percent), on the one hand, and the large proportion
(21 percent) from private, faith-based institutions
on the other (see table 1). Although further analysis
is needed to determine whether foci differ by institutional
type, the work undertaken by the ten campuses selected
to participate in the project suggests that most of
these practices are available to campuses across the
spectrum. Indeed, our experience on the project is that
very different campuses are learning a great deal from
each other's efforts (see box at end of article).
Table 1. Applicant institutions
Associate's colleges |
12% |
Baccalaureate colleges-Liberal Arts |
14% |
Baccalaureate colleges-General |
4% |
Master's colleges and universities |
37% |
Doctoral/research universities |
21% |
Specialized institutions |
2% |
Faith-based institutions |
21% |
Minority-serving institutions |
8% |
Emerging Themes and Variations
Five interrelated themes recurred throughout the proposals.
1. Institutional Context. Based on
the application narratives, most of the 139 institutions
are already deeply engaged in a multiplicity of reform
efforts in undergraduate education, including innovations
in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Thus, the
proposed campus projects emerge from dynamic institutional
contexts of ongoing reform. They are not isolated activities,
nor are they presented as activities that will catalyze
dormant or troubled institutions. These campuses chronicle
an impressive array of existing educational experiences
that are themselves integrative, including learning
communities, first-year programs, interdisciplinary
courses, multicultural experiences, service learning,
study abroad and other experiential opportunities, and
general education reform more broadly.
Many campuses also identify ongoing efforts to document
student learning outcomes using, for example, portfolios
or capstone courses within the major. Several proposed
projects build on these earlier, more limited integrative
assessment efforts and take them to the next level by
developing, for example, e-portfolios or capstone courses
to integrate general education and the major. Thus,
many of the campus projects are innovative in that they
take an integrative process or activity that has been
productive within a more limited frame and expand its
capacity to integrate more elements of the collegiate
experience, include more students, or expand its reach
horizontally and vertically through time. The projects
emerge from and reflect the ongoing institutional commitment
to educational experimentation in teaching, learning,
and assessment.
2. Intentional Designs to Promote Coherence.
The multiplicity of rich educational activities already
flourishing on these campuses is essential to understanding
their need and readiness to pursue a project on integrative
learning. Campuses recognize that they are providing
an array of powerful educational experiences, but are
looking for more formal, systematic ways to help students
make meaning of these varied and often fragmented experiences.
Whether the proposed project is intended to enable students
to connect liberal arts and the major or curricular
and cocurricular experiences or "head, heart, and hands"--characteristic
of the goals of faith-based institutions--the underlying
concern is to promote coherence across the undergraduate
experience. The projects are framed as the connective
tissue among collegiate experiences so that the whole
will be greater than the sum of its parts, and are designed
intentionally to clarify and amplify what students learn
to enable them to access and apply this learning more
readily in the future. Stated simply, campuses want
to ensure that students can "connect the dots" regardless
of their unique undergraduate careers in order to maximize
the aggregate experience we call "college."
3. Prognosis for Transformational Change. One
might conclude that a new capstone course or e-portfolio
is nothing more than another isolated experience to
add to the litany of requirements. Carefully planned
and enacted, capstones, portfolios, and other projects
hold promise of being transformative by changing the
expectations that students, faculty, and administrators
have for the undergraduate experience as a whole. The
projects support development of reflective and intentional
learners who will be able to make meaning of and bring
coherence to the disparate paths they take through college
and into their lives beyond graduation. To accomplish
this goal requires a reinvention of the undergraduate
experience with collective responsibility for its coherent
design, implementation, and assessment. In that sense,
many of the projects, even those limited to the development
of a single integrative course or assessment tool, have
the potential to instigate change throughout the curriculum.
For many campuses, the project is designed to serve
as a change agent, mobilizing faculty and campus leaders
to reflect on the need for greater integration and coherence,
to consider their roles and responsibilities in this
effort, and to provide "opportunities to connect."
The projects differ in their focus, scope, and capacity
to drive change, but taken together, they offer a portrait
of an emerging movement in higher education. The signs
have been there for several years and were captured
in AAC&U's 2002 report, Greater Expectations:
A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College,
and more recently in Integrative Learning: Mapping the
Terrain by Mary Huber and Pat Hutchings (2004), but
the Integrative Learning Project enabled us to see even
more clearly the breadth of institutional interest and
activities and the challenges inherent in this work.
4. Faculty and Faculty Development as Integral
to Change. To meet the challenges and to promote
transformation, the majority of campuses identify faculty
engagement and faculty development as key elements of
campus change efforts. The discussion of faculty involvement
is prominent in several proposals, with references to
the number and range of faculty across the disciplines
who participated in planning the proposed projects,
concern for how best to engage faculty in ongoing efforts,
and discussion of why faculty engagement is both essential
and challenging. Several applications note that the
proposed projects had been approved by academic governance
and care had been taken to vet the projects with faculty
and advisory groups. All of this bespeaks the recognition
that efforts to promote integrative learning should
engage faculty who ultimately will do the heavy lifting
of planning, implementing, and assessing its impact.
The proposed approaches to faculty development vary
widely and include faculty learning communities and
communities of practice; workshops; faculty conversations;
collaborative development of integrative assignments,
assessments, and scoring processes as forms of faculty
development; and faculty mentoring. The proposals that
focus on faculty development do a compelling job of
establishing the need for it, although some provide
only limited discussion of their conceptual framework
or plans for faculty development beyond cursory references
to a method (e.g., workshops), without further explication.
Nonetheless, faculty development is on the radar screen
for the majority of campuses as a valued and important
dimension of their change efforts.
5. Back to Basics. The theme of faculty
development underscores the recognition that integrative
learning requires new ways of thinking about teaching,
learning, and assessment and the development of new
skills. This need is particularly evident in the questions
posed by campuses. The call for proposals asked campuses
to identify questions that they hoped to answer through
their proposed work. A few campuses indicated they would
frame their questions later in the process. Several
posed procedural questions--variants of "how can we
do what we propose?" But one of the most frequent responses
was a list of fundamental questions that go to the heart
of the matter: What is integrative learning? How do
you teach for it? How do you assess it? How do you prepare
faculty to teach and assess it? A few campuses asked
if there is a developmental sequence in integrative
learning, and, if so, how colleges could promote student
development from one stage to the next. Finally, a few
asked questions about the impact of different approaches
to integration on student learning and retention or
about how faculty themselves learn to integrate across
courses and disciplines.
In short, even though campuses indicated that they
were eager to pursue integrative learning as a valued
goal, many nonetheless asked the most basic questions
about it. What does this tell us? It reveals that institutions
are just beginning the quest to understand what integrative
learning means for their faculty and students, even
as they pursue it with commitment in order to redress
the fragmentation of the undergraduate experience. Asking
these fundamental questions is a bold, honest, even
audacious way to begin that quest in earnest. We recognize
that our analysis is based on applications with the
inherent biases of self-report and self-promotion. It
is therefore all the more surprising to hear so many
institutions say with candor that they are still actively
grappling with the meaning of integrative learning.
Both their candor and their search for understanding
offer further compelling evidence of the intense interest
in integrative learning on American campuses. Certainly
this was so among the 139 colleges and universities
vying for inclusion in the Integrative Learning Project.
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