Integrative learning reforms in addition to the e-portfolio

A number of curriculum reform questions took on importance during the 2004-2005 academic year as the campus community discussed the Acting Provosts's white paper on general education (see what we say elsewhere about this unanticipated event) and those questions both shaped our work and produced some uncertainly as to the tasks ahead. Rather than bring all reform on integrative learning to a halt as that discussion unfolded, we continued wiith the rearticulation of our approach to science literacy, especially in Freshman Inquiry (and here we also welcome you to look at an interesting approach to integrative learning in an interdisciplinary science-oriented cluster course). We made public the results of two surveys, one aimed at telling us whether students' experience of cluster courses was intellectually coherent and another asking University Studies faculty to report what degree aspects of internationalization were a part of their course. We also reported findings about cluster course offerings that were likely to have significant bearing on how we move to greater conceptual and methodological coherence in Sophomore Inquiry and cluster courses—and how we conceive the use of the e-portfolio as a vehicle for capturing and representing the integrative work of students.

Our continuing focus on interdisciplinarity

We continue to find the work of our colleagues on interdisciplinarity of key importance to our curricular projects at Portland State University. We have paid special attention to the following.

Julie Thompson Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities, University Press of Virginia, 1996; Barbara Leigh Smith and John McCann (editors), Reinventing Ourselves: Interdisciplinary Education, Collaborative Learning, and Experimentation in Higher Education, Anker Publishing Company, 2001; Lisa R. Lattuca, Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching Among College and University Faculty, Vanderbilt University Press, 2001; and Carolyn Haynes (editor), Innovations in Interdisciplinary Teaching, Oryx Press, 2002.

Lisa R. Lattuca, Lois J. Voight, and Kimberly Q. Fath. 2004. Does interdisciplinarity promote learning? Theoretical support and researchable questions. The Review of Higher Education 28(1), 23-48. This is a particularly intriguing paper. Lattuca and colleagues have a keen eye for theoretically important questions and the requisite avenues of research into them.