Integrative Learning
Transform Pedegogy and Pursue Excellence
Integrative Learning provides students with a unified, broad based intellectual education. The conceptual framework for the Integrative Studies Program is grounded in the AAC&U Greater Expectations report. This report emphasizes a call for more attention to purposeful, intentional and transparent teaching and learning. Knowledge in both individual and multiple disciplines is the foundation upon which integrative learning builds. The integrative teaching and learning process approaches teaching and learning in intentionally connected ways.
Integrative learning is a process by which students
- connect knowledge and skills from multiple sources and experiences
- apply knowledge and skills in varied settings
- utilize diverse points of view
- understand issues contextually
Integration across courses in the ISP, and between the ISP and the majors, is achieved in three primary ways. Courses offered in the ISP
- focus on students’ acquisition and development of a shared set of intellectual skills that build competence from 100 through 400-level course work
- foreground the questions a discipline asks, the methods it uses to engage those questions, and some of the key explanatory concepts arising from these types of inquiry
- explore cross-disciplinary themes of diversity, global issues, social and environmental engagement
An intentionally integrative program of general education enables students to
- see connections in seemingly disparate information
- adapt skills learned in one situation to problems encountered in another
- demonstrate a breadth of outlook and an awareness of complex interdependencies
- judge/decide (synthesize)
- take into account different dimensions of a problem, seeing it from different perspectives, making conceptual links
- connect skills and knowledge from multiple sources and experiences
- utilize diverse and contradictory points of view
- understand contextual frames