Integrative Learning: Challenges

“Integration” is a buzzword in higher education today. As colleges and universities (especially in the U.S.) struggle to articulate the distinctiveness and key advantages of a liberal arts curriculum, integrative learning has emerged as a selling point. Revisions to core curricula and new distinctive programs are popping up everywhere, especially at liberal arts colleges. What’s all the fuss about? What is integrative learning? Why should we care? And perhaps more importantly, Does it “work”? That last question is difficult to answer. Glossy university brochures and corresponding pronouncements from its leaders and representatives wax eloquently about Integration and its benefits. Can these claims be evaluated?

In sync with the times, a blue-ribbon committee has put forth a report in the National Academies Press (NAP). Thus 2018 brings us The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree. That’s a mouthful. I will simply refer to it as the “NAP Report” (link here to read online). The phrase “branches from the same tree” comes from a quote by Einstein. “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches from the same tree.” It represents a holistic view emphasizing the interconnectedness of different disciplines within that broad sphere we call (human) knowledge.

Today, a new college student is bedazzled and confused by an array of curricular choices. While many liberal arts college and universities include a “common core” that supposedly ties things together, a truly common core is quite uncommon these days. More common are distribution requirements: Take one course from Group A, two from Group B, one from Group C, etc. And of course, each group offers its own smorgasbord. Why this state of affairs? Part of it has to do with how universities have evolved to prioritize both faculty and student interests. Part of it has to do with the splintering of existing disciplines into new areas as that beast named Knowledge grows unsated. Partly because you can’t learn everything. Partly because the social and philosophical milieu emphasizes flattening any oppressive wisps of hierarchy, at least in name.

If the Integration buzzword has not reached your ears, the NAP Report opens by surveying the field. The blue-ribbon committee discusses the vexing issues surrounding higher education today, with its soaring costs leading to a questioning of its value. A contributing conundrum is how the nature of work has changed, with technology burrowing its way into every tiny facet. Job descriptions are changing. Folks are changing jobs much more frequently, in some cases voluntarily, in other cases they are being forced out. While company CEOs may extol the high-and-mighty values of a liberal arts education, cherry-picking particular aspects to highlight, line managers have different constraints and pressures hiring people into entry-level positions.

In Chapter 3 (“What is Integration?”), the NAP Report grapples with the lack of an agreement within higher education as to what Integration means. Not surprisingly, different institutions and programs take very different approaches to integrative learning. The committee writes: Different courses and programs use different pedagogical approaches and appear in different aspects of the curriculum… The many and varied goals of integration have implications for how the impact of integration on students should be evaluated by institutions. The chapter discusses the varied definitions developed by different disciplines; provides examples of different integration activities (in-class, co-curricular, linking multiple classes, etc); and discusses how Integration can be classified in three categories depending on the depth that different disciplines interact with each other. I’ve summarized these three categories below.

·      Multidisciplinary: Least integrated. Contributions to problem-solving come from each expert’s disciplinary home with little change to each disciplinary approach. A wicked problem is multifaceted. Let’s tackle it by each applying our disciplinary expertise.

·      Interdisciplinary: More integrated. Disciplinary experts, to some extent, combine or merge their perspectives and methods to generate new approaches to solve a problem. There is some, albeit limited, transcendence of home disciplines.

·      Transdisciplinary: Transformative integration. Experts coming together from different disciplines synthesize new paradigms and conceptual frameworks, as they solve a problem. Home disciplines are transcended in a significant way.

Great. So we’re “doing” some sort of Integration in our classes with our students and colleagues. Does it work?

It depends on what you mean by “work”. (Yes, that’s a very typical academic answer.) Integrative learning turns out to be very difficult to measure – the topic taken up by Chapter 4 of the NAP Report. There are qualitative parts and quantitative parts. How you measure something is tied to one’s disciplinary perspective. Here’s how the report summarizes the problem.

There are unique challenges to the evaluation of integrative educational courses and programs that stem from the fact that the various disciplines generate, evaluate, and disseminate evidence in different ways. Scholarly evidence in the fine arts is different from scholarly evidence in the humanities, and both are distinct from scholarly evidence produced in [STEM + Medicine] fields. Indeed, differences in judgments about what counts as evidence to warrant particular sorts of claims are among the key elements that define and distinguish disciplines. Communities of scholarly practice use different epistemologies and different methods of research. The artifacts they produce have different purposes and audiences. They evaluate the relevance and quality of evidence differently and consider different types and standards of acceptable evidence in making judgments. This is one of the greatest strengths of interdisciplinary work to begin with: the ability and willingness to draw from these rich traditions of data research, and analysis.

Having delved into educational research, particularly looking at quantitative studies used (and sometimes misused) to support a particular pedagogical approach, I now have a better appreciation of the complexity of the problem of measuring what “works”. The supposed gold-standard of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) is in many cases impractical and causes all sorts of additional problems and artifacts when implemented. Therefore, in many of the quantitative studies, there may be a correlation observed, but it’s challenging to extract causative factors as to why a particular pedagogical experiment or intervention “worked”. This is further compounded by the inability to truly measure “learning”; we use all sorts of proxies. And ethics aside, we can’t control for a variety of factors including the myriad short-term and long-term factors that constitute our human subjects, the students.

Is there “hard evidence” that integrative learning distinctively supports the lofty goals of a liberal arts education that prepares students for life, civic engagement, and of course finding and being adaptable in a job or career? NO. But that’s not surprising, given the challenges.

Let’s try a different question. Given the quantitative and qualitative evidence that we do have (much of which is anecdotal), should we pursue integrative learning? The NAP Report concludes YES. I recommend reading the report so you can come to your own conclusion as to whether resources should continually be funneled into Integration initiatives or whether you think many of the positive examples are highly localized and less broadly applicable. (There are some cool ideas out there!) I, for one, continue to support the idea of integrative learning, and I’m constantly tinkering with new approaches. I’ve engaged in team-teaching with others outside my discipline and enjoyed those experiences. I don’t think there’s one right or best way to do engage in integrative learning, and that success, however you measure it, will be highly context-dependent. That being said, I’m wary of the faddishness in which new Integration visionary dreams are unveiled. I’m especially wary when an administrator uses the phrase “evidence shows that…” to support such initiatives, because I have some idea as to the nature and strength of the purported evidence.

How long would it take to assemble stronger evidence that integrative learning directly leads to desirable learning outcomes? I don’t know, but it will be difficult. I close this blog post with a line in the report that encapsulates the crux of the problem.

The challenge for faculty and scholars who strive to evaluate integrative learning experiences will be to develop frameworks that permit them to evaluate the student learning outcomes they value and hope to provide, rather than those that are easy to measure.

P.S. For my summary of a different NAP report on undergraduate research, see here.