Much of the recent past in higher education has been spent
drilling down, creating deeper and deeper specialist knowledge wells. This has
obvious benefits in the production of rich seams of knowledge for an insatiable
world anxious to make breakthroughs and find unitary and universal solutions to
accelerate progress. It has also, however, had downsides. Knowledge specialisms
have a tendency to pursue narrowness as an endpoint, throwing up negative side
effects such as fragmentation, insularity, and inflexibility. The consequences
of these side effects have become more pronounced in a more reflexive
postnormal world. This reflexivity has evidenced itself in a sustained attack
on the deeply embedded culture of teacher-centeredness and the hegemonic
dominance of discipline-specific content knowledge. Integrative learning by its very nature will
play a central role in maintaining this paradigm shift in the coming decades.
Embracing pluralism and heterogeneity to ensure that the “book stands open and
the gates unbarred” directly confronts the partiality and territoriality of
knowledge built steadfastly through specialized disciplines, programs, and
courses. Its synthesizing impulse places students at the heart of learning,
enabling them to make connections across disciplines, contexts, and spaces.
Embracing, rather than excluding, the messiness and “troublesomeness” that
transformative learning often demands—and the existential anxiety that this may
throw up for both student and teacher alike—it seeks to merge content
knowledges with cognitive, affective, and operative student effectiveness. Its
transformative and emancipatory potential will grow as awareness of the
importance of student-centered learning intensifies. This will produce greater
intellectual malleability and flexibility which will increasingly challenge
pedagogical and epistemological orthodoxies and institutional logics and
practices