a statement on integrative learning

a statement on integrative learning
association of american colleges and universities
the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching
F ostering students’ abilities to integrate learning—across courses, over time, and between
campus and community life—is one of the most important goals and challenges of higher
education. The undergraduate experience can be a fragmented landscape of general education
courses, preparation for the major, co-curricular activities, and “the real world” beyond the
campus. But an emphasis on integrative learning can help undergraduates put the pieces
together and develop habits of mind that prepare them to make informed judgments in the
conduct of personal, professional, and civic life.
Integrative learning comes in many varieties: connecting skills and knowledge from multiple
sources and experiences; applying theory to practice in various settings; utilizing diverse
and even contradictory points of view; and, understanding issues and positions contextually.
Significant knowledge within individual disciplines serves as the foundation, but integrative
learning goes beyond academic boundaries. Indeed, integrative experiences often occur as
learners address real-world problems, unscripted and sufficiently broad to require multiple
areas of knowledge and multiple modes of inquiry, offering multiple solutions and benefiting
from multiple perspectives.
Many colleges and universities are creating opportunities for more integrative, connected
learning through first-year seminars, learning communities, interdisciplinary studies programs,
capstone experiences, individual portfolios, advising, student self-assessment, and other
initiatives. Often, however, such innovations involve only small numbers of students or exist in
isolation, disconnected from other parts of the curriculum and from other reform efforts. But a
variety of opportunities to develop the capacity for integrative learning should be available to all
students throughout their college years, and should be a cornerstone of a twenty-first century
education.
Students need programs of study that will help them understand the nature and advantages
of integrative learning and assist them in pursuing their college experience in more intentionally
connected ways. They also need courses designed by creative faculty that model and build
integrative skills, and curricula that define pathways that encourage integrative learning within
and across fields. Wider collaboration between academic and nonacademic staff, college and
community, four-year and two-year institutions, higher education and K-12 will create further
opportunities for integrative learning throughout students’ educational careers.
It is important for educators to work together to build knowledge about integrative
learning in its many varieties, and about how it is best encouraged and assessed. Developing
students’ capacities for integrative learning is central to personal success, social responsibility,
and civic engagement in today’s global society. Students face a rapidly-changing and ever-
more-interconnected world, in which integrative learning becomes not just a benefit... but
a necessity.
This statement was developed in conjunction with the national project, Integrative Learning:
Opportunities to Connect. March 2004.

---