Book Chapter Details
Mandatory Fields
Kilcommins, S et al
2015 January
Integrative Learning: international research and practice
Conclusion - integrative learning: a pathless path
Routledge
London
Published
1
Optional Fields
integrative learning
                          

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

978-0-415-71107-4
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