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14 2 from Student learning to teaching foundations tricia a. ferrett Chapter 1 made a practical and moral case for connected science in higher education today, and it set this case within a historical context while looking forward to the kind of scholarship that will be required to understand the results of this educational philosophy when it is put into action. The heart of connected science lies in our work with students. Thus, i turn now to a discussion of how connected science learning can benefit them. Then, i sketch some emerging themes for teaching that are implied by this student learning discussion and the literature—and grow out of the case studies in this book. The Value of Connected Science for Students today, the demands of a more global, connected, information-rich, and changing world places a higher premium on our students’ abilities to integrate information and experience across traditional boundaries. educators can no longer leave to chance the likelihood that students will make meaningful connections on their own across disciplines, courses, and experiences. College educators have often proclaimed that learning needs to be more than the sum of the parts. in fact, the liberal arts tradition intends for students to find high value through a broad education, connecting ideas and disciplinary fields in fruitful ways as they become lifelong learners. however, as faculty have come to better understand the challenges of making integrative and interdisciplinary connections in their own lives as teachers and scholars, they have become increasingly skeptical about whether college students can do this effectively enough on their own. From Student Learning to Teaching Foundations | 15 it is time to help students create more than the sum of the parts—with purpose and in structured community. The challenge now is to teach ourselves, through work with and study of our students, how to do this well. This book is our collective contribution to this effort. We describe here scholarly case studies of student learning in order to flesh out in a concrete way what connected science learning really looks like, how it works, the implications for teaching, and the inherent challenges and rewards for all involved. let’s return to Jeff and alice for a moment. how do they differ? Jeff was taking his learning to a new level in several ways. he was making connections between science concepts, decision making, and action. he clearly had become self-directed in his education. he was also developing an identity within an interdisciplinary learning community that was growing its capacity to act in the world with defined purpose. Jeff, more than alice, is demonstrating characteristics of a connected science learner. alice, while recognizing the importance of human issues for her research on the biochemistry of hiV-aidS drugs, was constrained by the norms of a teaching culture that did not design for or encourage higher levels of connection making. Clearly, the characteristics of the learner, the teacher, and the local culture are powerful factors in connected science learning and teaching. i tackle the first of these—the learner—by articulating student learning goals for connected science. What are connected science learning goals for students? first, a disclaimer. This discussion is not meant to be complete. College educators are only beginning to articulate these kinds of learning goals for students, along with teaching practices that promote them. Thus, what follows is a synthetic and evidence-based attempt to articulate student learning goals for connected science. i draw freely on my own and others’ ideas, across time, my experience, the literature, and a number of relevant reform projects. This original articulation will expand, interconnect, and deepen as educators and scholars think about, engage in, and study this kind of learning and teaching. each instructor will emphasize a different subset of these learning goals, a variability reflected directly in the case studies in the volume. i begin with some larger families of learning goals that apply inside and outside science learning, followed by narrowing to ones that are related to and grow from more science-rich contexts. The integrative learner prior work on integrative learning is a fruitful place to start delineating connected science goals for students. The Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching, in collaboration with aaC&U, hosted the integrative learning project (ilp), engaging 10 institutions over three years. The final public ilp report (huber et al., 2007) describes integrative learning as “developing the ability to make, recognize, and evaluate connections among disparate concepts, fields, or contexts” (np). This kind...

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