Tbers,

  I thought many of you on this list would enjoy this perspective on  
liberal education.

Mr. James B. Greenberg
Director Teaching, Learning and Technology Center
Milne Library
SUNY College at Oneonta
Oneonta, New York 13820

email: [log in to unmask]
phone: 607-436-2701
fax:   607-436-3081

"Ignorance is curable, stupidity lasts forever"

>
> If you are unable to view this message, please visit Carnegie  
> Perspectives online at
> http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives
>
>
> February 2007
> A different way to think about ... liberal education
> A college education (so the story goes) once prepared someone to be  
> a learned generalist, an educated citizen in the broadest sense  
> whose understandings were richly integrated for application to  
> matters both worldly and divine. As fields of scholarship grew and  
> scholars narrowed, the college curriculum followed suit. Students'  
> majors and professional preparations came to dominate college  
> education, and the general was forced out by the particular and the  
> special. Both faculty members and students became academic  
> "siloists," learning comfortably within ever more circumscribed  
> domains.
>
> One response to the dangers of the academic silo has been a  
> resurgence of interest in combating the dis-integration of the  
> undergraduate experience with intentional efforts at integration.  
> In this month's Perspectives, Mary Huber and Molly Breen draw on  
> their work in the Integrative Learning Project, a partnership  
> between Carnegie and the Association of American Colleges and  
> Universities (AAC&U). Recounting narratives they heard in New  
> Orleans about the challenges of responding to Katrina, they argue  
> for the kinds of integrated education needed to prepare students to  
> respond creatively and with commitment to our society's most  
> critical challenges.
>
> Carnegie has created a forum—Carnegie Conversations—where you can  
> engage publicly with the authors and read and respond to what  
> others have to say about this article athttp:// 
> www.carnegiefoundation.org/perspectives/february2007.
>
> Or you may respond to Mary and Molly privately  
> [log in to unmask]
>
> We look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Lee S. Shulman
> President
> The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
>
> ...................................................................... 
> ...............................
>
> Integrative Learning: Putting the Pieces Together Again
> By Mary Taylor Huber and Molly Breen
>
> In her talk at the annual meeting of the Association of American  
> Colleges and Universities in New Orleans this January, Sister Helen  
> Prejean, native of that city and author of Dead Man Walking, called  
> on educators to provide students a "total human education." After  
> all, what short of this could prepare them—or any of us—to cope  
> with an event as widely devastating as Hurricane Katrina? Indeed,  
> participants at the meeting had many opportunities to see and hear  
> about New Orleans' slow, painful reconstruction. Marvalene Hughes,  
> president of Dillard University, opened the event with a  
> heartrending, heart-lifting account of that historically black  
> university's physical, academic and spiritual rebuilding—and its  
> struggle to assure its future. The city itself has less than half  
> the population it had before the storm, and is faced with decisions  
> nearly overwhelming in their difficulty.
>
> And that's the point. Conference participants could not have had a  
> better reminder that democracy's big questions (the meeting's  
> theme) are breathtakingly complex, and that to engage them  
> constructively, people need to develop the capacity to connect. For  
> colleges and universities, the educational implications are clear.  
> Breadth and depth of learning remain hallmarks of a quality liberal  
> education. But if we want to prepare students to compose  
> responsible lives in a world in which we are all at least  
> figuratively "In Over Our Heads" (as psychologist Robert Kegan puts  
> it), depth and breadth are no longer sufficient. According to the  
> AAC&U's new report, College Learning for the New Global Century,  
> integrative learning should be considered an "essential learning  
> outcome."
>
> To be sure, there's a sense in which all learning is integrative,  
> if only because new ideas must somehow connect to prior ones. When  
> educators single out integrative learning for special attention,  
> however, they are usually talking about larger leaps of imagination— 
> about linking ideas and domains that are not easily or typically  
> connected. You are familiar with the varieties:
>
> connecting knowledge from multiple fields and sources, as many  
> faculty did, for example, in impromptu or "emergent" teaching on  
> Hurricane Katrina
> applying theory to practice in various settings, as all the  
> professionals involved in the reconstruction of New Orleans are  
> called to do
> utilizing diverse and even contradictory points of view, as the  
> moral, civic and political challenges involved in rebuilding the  
> city's damaged institutions require
> understanding issues and positions contextually, in order to  
> counteract the tendency toward what Milan Kundera calls  
> "provincialism: the inability (or the refusal) to imagine one's own  
> culture in the larger context"
> A student in a mathematics and English learning community at the  
> College of San Mateo got the point. Integrative learning, he said  
> to his teachers, means "tying things together that don't seem  
> obvious."
>
> How to help students tie these threads—and tie them well—is the  
> challenge. Most theories of intellectual development construe the  
> ability to integrate knowledge as a relatively sophisticated skill,  
> one which develops over time and requires considerable effort and  
> experience to attain. For example, Benjamin Bloom placed synthesis  
> near the "top" of his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, while  
> William Perry argued that the capacity for synthesis develops as  
> students progress through varieties of dualism and relativism to  
> arrive—if they ever do—at the capacity for commitment in the face  
> of uncertainty. Whatever the particular typology, it would appear  
> that students need multiple opportunities to learn and practice the  
> arts of integration throughout their college years.
>
> Fostering integrative learning, then, involves broad-based campus  
> change. Although integrative skills can (and should) be taught  
> within particular courses, departments and institutional divisions,  
> the fact is that students take more than one course in more than  
> one department; integration cannot by its very nature be pursued  
> effectively in any single course or program. Indeed, the most  
> promising initiatives for integrative learning are focused on  
> finding strategic points of connection, threading attention to  
> integrative learning throughout (and between) an institution's  
> various programs and encouraging students' own efforts to connect  
> the dots.
>
> Fortunately, the higher education community is gaining significant  
> experience in designing such initiatives. The 10 campuses  
> participating in the Integrative Learning Project, a three-year  
> initiative sponsored by AAC&U and The Carnegie Foundation for the  
> Advancement of Teaching, offer ample evidence of this. Several  
> focused on strategic sites in general education: the first-year  
> experience, senior capstones or the middle years—especially  
> important to transfer students. Some campuses chose special  
> programs, like learning communities and study abroad. Still others  
> painted their canvases institution-wide: helping faculty design  
> assignments aligned with common liberal learning outcomes;  
> integrating cross-cutting literacies into the full arc of a  
> student's education; scaling up an e-portfolio program to offer  
> more students this tool for integrating academic, personal and  
> community life.
>
> Walter Isaacson, biographer of Ben Franklin and vice-chairman of  
> the Louisiana Recovery Authority, gave the closing plenary address  
> at the AAC&U meeting. Franklin, like New Orleans' leaders today,  
> struggled with one of democracy's biggest questions: When do you  
> hold true to principles and when do you compromise? His answer,  
> Isaacson said, was always to compromise—except when the result  
> would tyrannize others. We may not have many Ben Franklins in our  
> midst right now, but higher education does have a responsibility to  
> help form leaders skilled enough in integrative thinking to wrestle  
> with the issues, at once moral, civic and environmental, that face  
> us today.
>
> ________
>
> See the Integrative Learning Project's Public Report at
> http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/integrativelearning
>
>
>
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