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Heightened interest in integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies has led many to wonder about the relationship between these concepts. "Integrative learning" is the broader of the two. It is an umbrella term for structures, strategies, and activities that bridge numerous divides, such as high school and college, general education and the major, introductory and advanced levels, experiences inside and outside the classroom, theory and practice, and disciplines and fields. "Interdisciplinary" studies is a subset of integrative learning that fosters connections among disciplines and interdisciplinary fields. This essay examines historical and pedagogical links between integrative learning and interdisciplinary studies.
Historical Perspective
Neither integration nor interdisciplinarity is new. A Working Group on Integrative Learning formed through the Association of American Colleges and Universities' Greater Expectations initiative traced underlying ideas of connection and synthesis to ancient philosophy (2003). The earliest notable uses of the term "integration" in modern history appeared in books on principles of psychology by Herbert Spencer (1855) and William James (1896) and in Alexis Bertrand's theory of integrated instruction (1898). In the 180Os, integration was also linked with the role schools play in promoting social unity, and the Herbartian movement's doctrine of correlation, which supplemented the doctrine of concentration by recognizing "natural relations" among subjects (Ciccorico 1970, 60).
The meaning of integration expanded in the twentieth century. At the postsecondary level, integrating disciplines and developing the "whole" person were primary values in the general education movement that arose in the opening decades, though interdisciplinary models differed on whether the proper locus was the content of texts in a prescribed curriculum or the process of knowing and understanding contemporary problems. In K-12, integration was associated in the 1920s with the Progressivists' social democratic vision of education centered on students' personal and social concerns, and the term "integrated curriculum" was linked with the project approach. It also appeared in conjunction with the core curriculum movement in the 1930s, with problem-centered cores in the 1940s and 1950s, and at several points with a broad-fields approach, skills across subjects, and child-centered, activity-based, and experience-based curricula. (Ciccorico 1970,62; Beane 1997,2-3,28-29; Klein 2002,5-6).
A key distinction emerged as well. By the mid192Os, organismic and Gestalt psychologists had introduced the notion of an integrated personality and described processes by which individuals seek...