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…”