Integrating by Parts

Something there is that doesn’t love a silo. A curriculum is divided into fields are divided into courses are divided into units are divided into assignments. Ever review a student’s final paper for a course and find that, somehow, she didn’t succeed in using the knowledge and skills that she actually did develop throughout the course? That final paper was constructed in a silo. There are a lot of factors from which the silo problem has been constructed and maintained. But, it’s pretty disheartening to imagine our learners going into their vocations and building silos around the challenges they find there…silos with high walls that keep out all the knowledge, intuition, skills, and habits that they’ve poured themselves into developing.

My institution’s response-in-progress to the silo problem is a capstone project to the M.Div program, the “Final Integrative Paper.”

“Integration” can mean more than one thing, but for our purposes here, it’s not complicated: The learner is to construct a project that prompts her to integrate the knowledge and skills she’s achieved in course work, toward the intelligent resolution of a single case study. She does not need to act on the project; that is, she does not have to try to effect the solution; in fact, in many cases, the case study involves an encounter already resolved some way or other in the past. The idea is that she will have learned what it’s like to draw upon her hard-won skill set when addressing fresh, complex, real-world problems.

Our M.Div students all take a six-semester course series called “Vocational Formation & Church Leadership”, or “VFCL.” This is the “lab” in which they develop and articulate their vocations, usually in terms of some ordained or lay ministry of the church. In their 4th and especially 5th semesters, they receive guidance in choosing a case study suitable to their Final Integrative Project, and writing up 1) a description of the case, 2) a series of reflections on the case that engages their course work to date, and 3) a possible response to that case, including (where applicable) a self-assessment of how the student handled the case in real life. Students develop their “FIP” in small groups with a faculty member as guide, and successful review of the FIP by a team of faculty members is a graduation requirement.

Since the purpose of the project is “integrative,” the learners should choose cases that allows them to “use their ammo,” so to speak: a case that invites engagement with each of the “Areas” of their course work. These are Biblical Studies and Church History, Theology & Ethics, and Theory & Practice of Ministry courses (e.g., in preaching, pastoral care, spiritual formation, congregational leadership, Christian education, evangelism).

Among the requirements embedded in the assignment rubric is that the learner acknowledge alternative approaches or points of view. In their use of biblical texts, for example, the learner ought not simply to “proof text” passages that support their approach to a case, but deal forthrightly with “counter texts,” passages that may challenge or critique their understandings. Additionally, they should recognize that any text is open to multiple interpretations, including readings that challenge their own. Naturally, the biblical text’s historical context should have a role, even where the learner does not take that context as determinitive for the meaning she seeks the passage to support. In my experience, this requirement—basic to the project—is one of the hardest for many learners to “get”: challenges to their thesis, texts that don’t say what they need the Bible to say…the natural impulse is to sweep these under the rug. Analogies can be imagined from church history or theology;  any material can be “proof texted,” not just the Bible. Of course, if all the material you select for the treatment of a case just happens to jibe seamlessly together in support of your chosen resolution of the case, then obviously only a surface-level “integration” can be going on, no matter how many discrete fields you draw on.

Early results on the FIPs show a lot of promise, and some work to be done. While I think most instructors incorporate some elements (explicit or implicit) of “integration” in their regular course design, we don’t all use the same language for it and we don’t all prompt reflection on it. It’s easy to understand how students can gain some real practice integrating the skills & knowledge of one subject matter into another, without quite realizing they have done so, still less reflecting on it in a way that helps them transfer their success into future efforts at integration.

Frustratingly, discussions among faculty and students about “integration” can get derailed pretty easily—this is Higher Ed, after all—by wide-ranging, chin-stroking safaris into what “integration” might meeeaaaann. For example, we also talk in seminary about the “destructive” or “disintegrative” aspects of early course work, when a student’s presuppositions (e.g., about the Bible) are taken apart. In that context, we discuss strategies for helping students “reconstruct” or “re-integrate” their religious world view in light of what they’ve learned. “So what is ‘integration’ reeaaallly?” There’s nothing we academics like more than a good old, Maybe We Need Another Name for X round table. And of course, we are at least as prediposed (as mostly people of faith) to preserve mystery around a concept as we are (as mostly PhDs) to eliminate mystery. So, sometimes we need to be hit with a 2×4 and reminded to KEEP IT SIMPLE: for the FIP, “integrative” means, “Treat your course work as a tool kit, digging into it and choosing apt tools to integrate into your reflections on, and response to, your case.”

We have only been in the “FIP” game for about 3-4 years now, and we have curriculum review on the horizon. So what, in your institutional context, counts as “integration”? What practices are in place to join the siloes together? What’s your calculus for helping learners integrate by parts?

Photo Credit: “Integration” by someone1939, protected by the artist with a CC BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license.

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