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ISP Faculty Resources Overview

The Integrative Studies Program is designed to provide students with a unified, broad-based intellectual experience during their years at Keene State College. Students in the ISP are encouraged to draw connections across disciplinary divisions and between their lower and upper-level courses. Such a unified approach to intellectual development doesn’t happen by accident. Instead of simply assuming that incoming students already possess the intellectual skills we hope they will have in their senior year, faculty teaching ISP courses make a conscious effort to teach, cultivate, further develop, and assess these particular skills needed to participate in a liberal arts education, and for lifelong learning.

No one course can focus in depth on all the ISP outcomes. Each member of the ISP faculty community contributes her or his vision, expertise, and intellectual passion to the delivery of a limited and specific number of program outcomes. No student will be able to perfect her or his intellectual skills in one semester; because the ISP is a developmental program, faculty intentionally structure into their upper-level classes opportunities for students to practice and strengthen the intellectual skills acquired in the first years of the program. By requiring all ISP courses to emphasize, encourage, and actively assess specific outcomes, the Integrative Studies Program creates an environment where students acquire (and have ample opportunities to practice) a core set of intellectual skills across a range of course content by the time they graduate.

Mission

The Integrative Studies Program is at the core of the College’s commitment to a liberal arts education. The program’s focus on broad questions, and the integration of knowledge and skills, complements student work in a chosen major. Drawing on disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, the program offers students intellectual concepts and skills for understanding themselves and their place in the world, including the values that contribute to personal growth and social responsibility.

Contact the Integrative Studies Program

Celia Rabinowitz
Dean of Mason Library
celia.rabinowitz@keene.edu
☎ 603-358-2736