Curricular Cohesion

General education programs generally draw on multiple disciplines. Such programs can only be coherent if students learn how to integrate the insights they gain from multiple disciplines. Otherwise, students tend to wonder why they were required to take particular courses, and do not draw connections across the different courses that they take [See Teaching the Conflicts]. The good news is that there are successful strategies for Teaching Interdisciplinary Integration.

If -- and only if -- we show students how to integrate across disciplines, we can encourage them to recognize both synergies and conflicts between the material of different courses. If we teach them how to transcend conflicts we encourage them to compare and contrast and connect insights from diverse disciplines. We thus encourage a variety of other General Education goals such as Preparing Students for Lifelong Learning.

One of the goals of General Education is to help students place their Major in context. This can only happen if students learn how to connect insights from within their Major with related insights from beyond the Major. They need again to have the tools with which to address any conflicts.

Where possible it is useful to gather students with different Majors into some sort of capstone course in which complex interdisciplinary issues are addressed. Students can then collaborate in developing interdisciplinary analyses.

The Lumina Foundation's Degree Qualifications Profile at http://degreeprofile.org/stresses that students need to know how to connect the information from various courses they take; this prepares them to draw connections in their jobs and lives as citizens. But the DPQ does not fully appreciate the necessity of interdisciplinarity for achieving this goal.