An undergraduate's university experience is often fragmented, with courses, service opportunities, and extra-curricular activities seemingly unconnected to one another. Integrative learning transcends academic boundaries, and encourages students to address real-world problems, to synthesize multiple areas of knowledge, and to consider issues from a variety of perspectives. Fostering students’ capacity to integrate their learning is one of the main goals of higher education, and is often one of the greatest challenges (Huber and Hutchings, 2004). How can we help instructors provide opportunities in the classroom to facilitate integrative learning?
Many instructors at the University of Waterloo are very good at designing courses and programs that help students actively participate in their learning and integrate their experiences. As instructional developers with the Centre for Teaching Excellence, we will highlight what instructors are already doing to help students integrate their learning and inspire other instructors to incorporate similar strategies into their teaching. To do this, we developed a model to build and support two different instructor community groups, a faculty specific community group for the Faculty of Engineering and a campus-wide community group.
At this round table, we will share how we built and supported the community groups, the dynamics of the meetings, the resources we provided and the evidence we used to measure the success of the model. We welcome feedback from the participants about the model and how can we improve it.