Integrative Learning
Mapping the Terrain
Description:... One of the great challenges in higher education is to help students integrate their learning. The capacity to make connections is essential to the conduct of personal, professional, and civic life, and is at the very heart of liberal education. It is also, arguably, more important than ever, and more difficult to achieve, as students transfer among multiple institutions and struggle to balance work and study. Indeed, many of the basic structures of academic life encourage them to see their courses as isolated requirements to complete. This paper explores the challenges to integrative learning today as well as its longer tradition and rationale within a vision of liberal education. In outlining promising directions for campus work, the authors draw on AAC&U's landmark report "Greater Expectations" as well as the Carnegie Foundation's long-standing initiative on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Readers will find a map of the terrain of interactive learning on which promising new development in undergraduate education can be cultivated, learned from, and built upon.
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