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117 10 pedagogies of integration richard a. gale abrupt climate change: What is it and how do we know it when we see it? Why do we call it abrupt when it takes so long to happen? What makes something abrupt rather than gradual on a planetary scale? Where did we get these data, and how do humans figure into this? These were only a few of the questions raised by Carleton College freshman students one September morning. as class discussion shifted from the younger dryas event (which was part of the course) to greenland ice cores (which was sort of part of the course), to the rise of stable agricultural societies (which was not part of the course), to the domestication of livestock (certainly not part of the course), students began comparing time lines learned in high school to anthropology textbooks nestled in backpacks. not every question was answered, and not every answer was definitive, but for just under an hour these twelve students were using the knowledge gained in class, matching it with information from other classes, relating it to vacations they had taken and newspaper articles they had read, and committing themselves to outside unassigned research in an effort to make sense of their world and satisfy their own growing curiosity. This was a day of integrative learning, and it was the result of an intentional pedagogy designed to help students weave the often disparate elements of their college years into a fabric functional enough to wear yet fine enough to show. it was early in the fall of 2005 and the course had only met a few times, but already the students were starting to get into the idea of abrupt climate change as something more complicated and complex than headlines and high temperatures. Because this first-year interdisciplinary science course fulfilled a general education requirement 118 | Structures That Support Integrative Learning the students formed a fairly representative sampling of the community at Carleton College, but the course was far from typical. in fact, it was part of a scholarly study designed from scratch by two chemists, team-taught by one of those chemists and a psychologist, and never before offered at any college anywhere. The Carleton professor was tricia ferrett, one of 21 Carnegie Scholars working to study and understand integrative learning during the 2005–2006 academic year. her plan was to document and analyze “integrative moments” as they arose in the first-year seminar, and to try to come to some understanding of how students connect prior ideas and learning with the seminar on complex systems. Specifically, she was interested in “the ways students [are] ‘going beyond’ as they make integrative moves in an inquiry seminar that circles a single transdisciplinary concept—abrupt change—with richly related perspectives from science and social science” (ferrett, 2006). to get at this question she chose readings , planned discussions, built assignments, and tried to create “an open playground for inquiry” (ferrett, 2006). in other words, she formed her pedagogy to meet the needs of her students and the objectives of integrative learning. This seems simple enough in the abstract, but it involves a complicated selection process, a dynamic tension between disciplinary content and departmental coverage, curricular planning and emergent awareness, the requirements of the course and the opportunities of the moment. integrative learning Much has been written about integrative learning and its goal of helping students make connections between isolated course materials, diverse course offerings, classroom knowledge and life skills, the world of school and the world of work. at the outset of their three-year collaboration on the integrative learning project, the association of american Colleges and Universities (aaC&U) and the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching defined integrative learning as occurring “in many varieties : connecting skills and knowledge from multiple sources and experience; applying theory to practice in various settings; utilizing diverse and even contradictory points of view; and, understanding issues and positions contextually” (2004). This perspective owes much to the groundbreaking work of Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College(aaC&U, 2002), which frames “the education all students need” in terms of “the intentional learner” who is both purposeful and self-directed in approaching college, and self-aware about the learning process and the uses of education. “intentional learners are integrative thinkers who can see connections in seemingly disparate information and draw on a wide range of knowledge to make decisions,” the authors note. “They adapt the skills learned in...

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