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Integration Goes Beyond Interdisciplinarity
As someone who helps faculty engage with integrative learning at LaGuardia Community College, I'm impressed with Emily Lardner and Gillies Malnarich's thoughtful article in the September/October 2009 issue of Change, “When Faculty Assess Integrative Learning.”
From what I can see, the project wrestled with competing definitions of integrative learning, but it used a rubric powerfully focused on interdisciplinary learning. Yet integrative strategies go beyond connecting learning across disciplines. They also focus on integration across semesters and years. Moreover, an integrative approach values connections between the academic and the lived curricula—between the world of the classroom and lives shaped by work, family, community, and culture.
At LaGuardia, we're addressing these facets of integrative learning in multiple projects, including ePortfolios and learning communities. Perhaps most notable is our new USDOE-funded work on capstone courses, where faculty redesign and teach capstones that help students connect learning across semesters and develop their identities as learners and professionals. Integration, synthesis, and transition are our themes. For urban community college students, most of them immigrants, this approach to integration is invaluable.
To meaningfully assess this kind of integrative learning requires a tool that can illuminate a rich, complex dynamic. We're at the early phases of testing it, but the AAC&U's newly generated VALUE rubric on integrative learning is a step in the right direction.
-Bret Eynon
LaGuardia Center for Teaching & Learning, LaGuardia Community College
Tech Transfer
The article “University Technology Transfer in Tough Economic Times” by Powers and Campbell [Change, November/December 2009] provides useful background data and an important admonition about the seductions of financial success associated with significant investment in technology transfer at developing campuses. The combined push of decreasing university external support, increasing pressure by external stakeholders for the university to be an engine for economic growth, and the dollar signs in the eyes of some faculty all exacerbate the urge to play in this knowledge-business lottery. My experience over the last twenty-five years provides anecdotal support for the arguments of Powers and Campbell.
The closing suggestion by the authors to change the paradigm to one that emphasizes technology transfer as a way of developing university-industry relationships to the advantage of both is important to underscore. Often our negotiations now cause an adversarial relationship between the university and industry.
We will and should continue to engage in technology transfer, albeit with a different paradigm. One additional important reason for this is that faculty (both in residence and being recruited) will demand it. For me, an additional important reason is to educate graduate and professional students in this activity when we are mentoring them and can create habits of mind regarding the professional style, ethics, pitfalls, and reasonable expectations associated with intellectual-resource-driven commercial activity. The graduate students of the morning are the industry researchers, faculty, and administrative leaders of the afternoon.
Finally, although universities may be nervous about this suggestion because of its possible downside, it may be time to consider an update of the Bayh-Dole legislation that would provide more impetus for the desiderata discussed in the article and this letter.
-George E. Walker
Development and Graduate Education, Graduate School, Florida International University
Managing Change
Andrea Kezar's provocative article on change in higher education immediately brought to mind similar problems I have encountered in my work on improvement efforts in K-12 schools. As in Kezar's description of change efforts in higher education, many of the schools I've studied have been overrun by well-intentioned but often disconnected, redundant, and conflicting initiatives. Rather than helping schools build the capacity for improvement, ultimately these ill-coordinated efforts serve to undermine the abilities of schools to make constructive changes.
While I agree with many of the points that Kezar makes, she does not emphasize enough that addressing the “multiple reform” problem requires a different perspective on change itself. Too often, organizational leaders treat change like a series of projects with a beginning, middle, and end. In contrast, I've argued that changes (positive, negative and neutral) are happening all the time, and the real challenge is not to make change but to manage it—to figure out how to adapt to changing conditions and demands.
That means that education leaders (and their funders) in higher education as well as in K-12 need to shift their focus from implementing new initiatives to developing the basic infrastructure that will enable people to work together productively around common goals. As Kezar suggests, that infrastructure should include regular opportunities for institution faculty and staff to share information and expertise, discover common interests, and develop a shared understanding of what they are doing and why. This is no small feat in colleges and universities, which come with multiple, and often conflicting, purposes.
One step in building that shared understanding may be opening up the higher education classroom so that students, faculty, parents and the general public can get a better sense of what actually goes on there. Making teaching and learning public (not just publishing the results of outcome measures) enables faculty to build on and coordinate their work and higher education institutions to engage in meaningful dialogue with relevant stakeholders about what students are actually learning and doing. Those institutions that open up their classrooms are likely to be in a much better position to maintain a focus on their chosen purposes and to demonstrate the value of their work even as expectations change, pressures from policymakers mount, and demands for accountability grow louder.
-Thomas Hatch
Teachers College, Columbia University and National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST)
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