Integrative Learning and the Gift of New Media: General Education for the 21st Century

Necker Cube
How to move from “general education” to “generalizable education.” That problem was the thread running through my keynote presentation at Benedictine University last March. Dr. Wilson Chen and the Benedictine General Education Task Force kindly invited me to speak to the way information and communication technologies could inform a revised general education curriculum–and, by implication, speak to what endures, what changes, and can be radically improved in higher education as a result of this revolution.

My answers came obliquely, as they typically do. (They come that way to me, so it’s only honest and fair to express them that way as well. At least, that’s what I tell myself.) In this case, I was obsessed with the idea of changing “general education” to “generalizable education.” Instead of what Tim Clydesdale calls the “liberal arts hazing” that first-year students “endure” (see his book The First Year Out for this chilling description) as they bounce from intro survey to intro survey, getting their general education like shots at a clinic, why don’t we explore the richly integrative possibilities of a truly generalizable education, an experience that stresses the kind of learning that stimulates persistent cross-domain thinking and imagining. Why not build a “general education” out of immersive, compelling experiences of analogy-making? My main inspiration was a book by Douglas Hofstadter called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. (My thanks to Jon Udell for turning me on to this book–it’s his favorite Hofstadter, and I can well understand why.) The book is entirely too rich for any summary to do it justice, but suffice it to say that Hofstadter takes Polya’s How To Solve It to a meta-meta level, in which disciplined cognitive procedures thoroughly informed by embodied, thick-context experience and observation leads to a certain “reframing” ability, what Hofstadter describes as a “Necker Cube” operation in which the cube can face out or in, depending on how one flips one’s perspective. To be able to perform such cognitive operations, not in a random way, but in a way guided by reason *and* intuition is, it seems to me, what we mean when we talk about “critical thinking”–and more. My thoughts are obviously indebted to Michael Wesch’s idea of moving from “knowledgeable” to “knowledge-able,” though I hope the particular case of general education–in which the idea of becoming truly knowledgeable is a non-starter–explores another angle of his complex argument. The idea of generalizability, as it came to me from Hofstadter, is also important, I think, for the idea of general education as integrative. And of course ICT is for me the meta-platform that, properly framed and built, is almost pure integrative potential. One of the Benedictine U folks asked me if my ideas suggested that majors should come in the first two years of one’s college career, with general education of the kind I was advocating becoming a capstone experience, not an introductory experience. I thought that was a brilliant idea, and I still do. What a breathtakingly risky undertaking that would be, to turn the curriculum on its head! Yet how rewarding to follow concentrated studies in a particular discipline with an increasingly integrative set of generalizable courses.

These are not particular cogent or illuminating remarks, I fear. I hope the talk itself is more lucid. The recording isn’t pristine, and the ideas are as always a work in progress–but hopefully the results will spark some thoughts in other folks, and lead us all together to something more than any of us could achieve on our own. Keep in touch, and let me know. My thanks to all the good folks at Benedictine for a truly wonderful, inspiring visit. I couldn’t have asked for better hosts, or more dedicated colleagues.

Oh yes: here are the slides as well.