Technology and Integrative Learning: Enabling Serendipitous Connectivity across Courses

Peer Review, Fall 2006 by Shi, David E

Many colleges and universities are already promoting and assessing engaged learning in distinctive ways. But can we do more? In fact, can we enhance liberal learning in more fundamental ways? Can we go beyond the now widespread emphases on greater engagement and commit ourselves to the more difficult task of promoting integrative learning? With that ambiguous proposition lingering in the air, let me provide some context to buttress its premises.

A paradox confronts residential liberal arts colleges. On the one hand, the world around us is being transformed by the increasing fragmentation of knowledge; the ferocious specialization of disciplines; the tidal wave of digitally refined and delivered information; the fragmenting energies of pluralism; and the increasing scale, complexity, and fluidity of global events and threats. In short, life is more dynamic and chaotic than ever before, demanding different competencies and perspectives from college graduates.

Yet too many campuses and too many of our colleagues in the academy continue to operate largely within traditional organizational structures and routine learning environments. Inertia prevails. However, change is in the air. In recent years, a small but growing number of colleges and organizations have committed themselves to creative efforts to reinvigorate the traditional ideal of integrative learning that initially constituted the core of liberal education.

Nexia-Fostering Integrated and Connected Learning

The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have made a concerted effort over the past three years to promote more integrated and connected learning. Integrative learning as promoted by AAC&U and the Carnegie Foundation is intended to help students intentionally connect ideas and insights from various disciplines and experiences. AAC&U and the Carnegie Foundation have applauded colleges for implementing first-year seminars, thematically connected learning communities, interdisciplinary opportunities, capstone experiences in the major, digital student portfolios, and student self-assessment instruments such as journals and blogs.

But these examples highlight one of our sternest challenges: to promote integrative learning comprehensively, over the entire span of a college experience, spatially and temporally. Rather than being satisfied with individual initiatives such as first-year learning communities and senior capstone courses, colleges need to help students make connections across learning experiences and over time. Integrative learning must be not an isolated event or exceptional curricular experience but a regular part of intellectual life-and its access portals must be readily accessible, day and night. Yet pedagogy on many campuses has not kept pace with technology. To be sure, new learning technologies have become commonplace, and the distribution of information and knowledge, as well as the speed and frequency of communication, have increased dramatically. Dazzling new electronic resources, however, have been used primarily as "add-ons to conventional ways of teaching and learning. Few institutions have fully embraced the strategic significance and transforming potential of new learning technologies. Even fewer have tried to yoke new learning technologies and innovative learning communities to the integrative premises of liberal education.

At Furman, we have been wrestling with such elusive possibilities. Our efforts have recently coalesced around an ambitious program we call Nexia that was stimulated an a planning grant from the Mellon Foundation. The term "nexia" embodies the plural of nexus-a link or connection. In this context, nexia denote the distributed nature of thinking within a truly integrative learning environment in which the centralizing focus of the major is deliberately complemented by links and threads of broader concern.

The Nexia concept comprises two related approaches to facilitating integrative learning within a residential liberal arts setting. The first approach is explicitly curricular and focuses on building and enhancing connectivity across courses. Like similar programs at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Carleton College, and the University of North Carolina-Asheville, Nexia will support faculty in designing multidisciplinary team-taught courses and forging fertile connections between separate courses that may he explored throughout the duration of an academic term.

The Nexia program is distinctive, however, in recognizing the limitations of such "designed connectivity tor nurturing the responsive, inventive nature of thinking within a fluid world that demands more nimble notions of learning and more immediate conduits of connectivity. Accordingly, Nexia's intent is not only to support prepackaged interdisciplinary courses, but also to enable serendipitous connectivity across courses. Such ad hoc connections may be prompted In current events, a spontaneous conversation in the faculty lounge, or a late-night residence hall conversation in which two students discover an intriguing point of convergence between discussions or readings in their respective classes.