Integrative General Education White Paper

First some context. As I may have mentioned once or twice, this year I got sucked into my university’s general education reform process, against the lessons of experience, interests of serenity, and focus on the teaching mission. I did this by reluctantly saying I would be willing to represent the Arts and Humanities on a committee no one else wanted to serve on, and because after three years of intensive collective deliberation, in committee and plenary, my colleagues had managed to produce a draft proposal that took a bloated, aimless mess of a core curriculum and turned it into a skeletal, aimless mess of a core curriculum.

In some sense I was and am fine with the latter. It was done intelligently, if not creatively, freed up a lot of units for minors or the elective explorations that are part of the heart of a liberal education, and went a long way toward fixing the problem that we were making many of our students loathe the liberal arts by subjecting them to a seemingly endless series of browbeatings. But even though the theme of integrative education had figured prominently and encouragingly in early discussions, by the final proposal it had completely vanished; so that like the old core, the new one had no conceptual or pedagogical coherence other than assertion that each individual course addressed a ‘goal’ and therefore was in its way essential to the formation of an educated person.

The modification I suggested to the reform committee, after a lot of discussion at the A&H level, was to add what we at first called a ‘cluster’ and later a ‘linked learning experience’. This is three thematically linked classes, from at least two different schools, taken together in one semester. Just that, for now – no requirement of faculty coordination or any other formally interdisciplinary apparatus. The idea is simply to, at least that once, show students explicitly a ‘liberal’ approach to question and problem formation, investigation, and perhaps problem-solving, in which disciplinary knowledge-in-depth is triangulated, reconfigured and brought into more widely effective alignments by interdisciplinary knowledge-in-breadth.

Despite the fact that to some of us this seemed like pretty tame stuff, the LLEs instantly became a bone of contention. As far as I know, no one disagrees that integrated learning is a ‘good thing’. However, in the larger discussions over the new proposal with the linked learning component, it became clear that a significant fraction of the faculty in general and the A&H faculty in particular did not see integrated learning as needing any particular attention; going so far as to assume it was a nice but inessential bonus, and/or something that could be expected to happen automatically if only a series of good courses were taken. As if that was how we all got it, ‘assuming facts not in evidence’ as the lawyers say. And certainly for many of us who have struggled our way to some kind of integrative intelligence, this seems like it must be true; although I can personally point to many, many experiences at home and at school from a particular kind of teacher that pulled me in this direction, along with plenty of others that tried to push me away.

But that’s the thing – I don’t know anyone who gets the importance of integrative learning who thinks it’s a luxury adjunct of a good education that can be left to chance. It’s the one thing that distinguishes ‘higher’ education from the various worthy technical educations, like plumbing, heating and cooling, business, nursing, history, and philosophy. It’s so important I negotiated away all of the required History classes to make room for a faint whisper of it. Not because the History classes aren’t good, or because there’s nothing essential to learn from history, but because someone who can learn and make connections responsibly will find their own way to history, literature, biology, statistics or whatever’s needed, and learn it a lot better than if it were jammed down their throats without purpose or context. (Here I remain strongly influenced by Dyke the Elder’s remark that he took Calculus three times, but didn’t learn the calculus until he needed it to do something else with; which in turn sensitized me to a vast educational research literature that says the same thing.)

But for a passionate fraction of Arts and Humanities, and Sciences too as it turned out, what matters far more than intentional integration is a critical mass of essential knowledges. Students are scientifically ignorant, so they need two science courses. They’re historically ignorant, so they need two history courses. Our uni has a religious tradition, so at least one Biblical religion class. Etc. These colleagues produced and published a draft alternate reform proposal, without the linked learning but with a couple more sciences and histories and whatnot; then withheld it from formal consideration out of admirable collegiality, and in confident anticipation that the full faculty would never vote for this scary, cumbersome linked learning stuff anyway. Sure enough, the full faculty voted for the linked learning proposal by a 60/40 margin. Now the opposition is bringing forward their proposal anyway, in a last heroic play to save what they can of the old core.

Which leads me to the actual matter of this post, an integrative general education white paper I’m working on for possible distribution as part of the reform committee’s advocacy for the proposal we just passed. This is still pretty rough, and I invite discussion. I should say that I have entirely given up on persuading the proponents of the alternate proposal, for present purposes anyway; I now think there are conceptual, dispositional, and emotional divides that are prohibitive to bridge in the short term. So this document is intended to clarify the issues for the people who voted for the linked learning proposal the first time around, and solidify their support for that project. I’m still not sure whether to prefer a rhetorically neutral presentation or a more direct, conversational address – this is the latter:

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Colleagues, although the General Education Committee is proud of the work we’ve done over these last several years, and of the faculty’s recent vote endorsing the plan so long and carefully deliberated, we welcome the opportunity to reflect further on MU’s goals and how to accomplish them. We appreciate that everyone in this discussion is motivated by commitment to get our general education core right, and to move MU to new levels of excellence.

On the surface, it may seem there is very little difference between the two proposals. The numbers work out about the same, while the new proposal adds back a couple of classes, takes out a couple of classes, and replaces the Linked Learning Experience with ‘further studies in the liberal arts’. Deciding between the proposals could be as easy as deciding if you think a required History class is more important than a required Speech class. The committee deliberated each of those decisions carefully and intentionally, but we are well aware that many other well-reasoned choices could be made.

However, this discussion is not just about nitpicking curriculum details, and therefore the committee would like to clarify what we see as the larger concepts at issue. And the one thing we would like to be clear in everyone’s mind during the coming discussion is that our plan is not a bad version of a more comprehensive core – for better or worse, it is a different concept of a core.

So first, we acknowledge that our plan omits or makes optional wonderful, important courses. Not just a few, not just a required History or a second Science or a richer engagement with foreign language. Statistics, Calculus, Genetics; Classics, Economics, Political Theory, Anthropology; World Religions, Women’s Literature, Sociology, Psychology, Ethics. Some familiarity with all of these and more is arguably essential to responsible citizenship and effective, meaningful living in the modern world.

Second, we acknowledge that our plan does not promote mastery in any of the areas it does cover. A brief foreign immersion does not create mastery of a foreign language. One Science class does not create mastery of the principles and practices of science. One Math class does not create broad-based numerical literacy. One History class does not a historian make.

Nor would two. In paring down the core’s coverage to a painful minimum in which many excellent things were lost, the committee was not just sinking to a least common denominator. We were embracing intentionally the hard fact that core curricula are not in any position to cover everything or to create broad-based mastery. Compared to the vast scope of scientific knowledge that affects our everyday lives, and the vast scope of scientific ignorance that afflicts our public discourse, two classes are as inadequate as one – two slender reeds against the flood. We think it is clear therefore that if coverage and mastery are the goals, the core is doomed to failure. We have already tried a more comprehensive coverage and found it wanting, mastery lacking. A class more or less, here or there in a much smaller core is no solution.

Fortunately, there is a much more realistic and sustainable way to think about what core curricula can accomplish. If we consider that the problem is not ignorance itself but narrowness and rigidity, a settled mind and lack of curiosity, the same class that would be an inadequate and swiftly-forgotten introduction to the vast content of a discipline can be an admirable invitation to the core concepts and investigative methods of that discipline. It can open students’ minds to new questions, new ways of thinking, new strategies of living effectively in the world, and lead them toward developing the relevant competencies themselves over a much longer lifetime than our curriculum can cover. In this model, the goal shifts from producing people who know a couple of things about a couple of things, to producing people whose curiosity is empowered, who learn actively, figure things out for themselves, work reliably without close supervision, adapt effectively to unfamiliar, complex and ambiguous situations, repurpose knowledge responsibly to meet new challenges, and problem-solve creatively.

Ideally, this shift would occur within each of the classes we teach. However, the same effect at a larger scale can be promoted through an intentional, transformative arrangement of separate classes, each doing ‘its own thing’. Just as a pile of stones is not a bridge, and a pile of flour, sugar and butter is not a cake, a pile of courses is not an education. This is where the Linked Learning Experience comes in. By bringing three different courses into simultaneous thematic alignment, linked learning engages students in multiple approaches to question and problem formation, investigation, and problem-solving, making thinking ‘outside the box’ virtually inevitable in a way separate classes simply cannot. Furthermore, through linked learning students can see directly the broader relevance and unique strengths of each field of study, enhancing their own awareness, resourcefulness, and appreciation for the value of continued learning – in the best tradition of the liberal arts.

In the committee’s view therefore, the Linked Learning Experience is the core of the core, the transformative element that takes the few credits available to the core and turns them into a real education. Linked learning is emphatically not, in our view, an optional addendum to a debate about how much of the old core we are going to keep. It is a new way forward.