Intentional and Integrated Learning in a New Cognitive Age: A Signature Pedagogy for Undergraduate Education in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

From its very start, the land-grant approach to higher education focused on intentional and integrated learning in ways that distinguished itself from previous models of higher education. Students needed different skills to solve die real problems facing real people in real communities. And they needed those skills quickly. They needed practical knowledge accompanied by hands-on training. The land-grant university was built around those needs, with a new curriculum and a new that were intentionally coordinated to integrate knowing with doing, in ways that mattered to those typically disenfranchised from higher education. In many significant ways, the core mission and values of the land-grant university persist into the twenty-first century. Land-grant universities remain committed to providing higher education to advance the public good. Like Michigan State University (MSU), they work hard to maintain their commitment to be open to the poorest, and good enough for the proudest. Perhaps most importandy, they remain committed to responding to society's needs in ways that keep them relevant and engaged. GLOBALIZATION-AND ITS EVEN LARGER CONTEXTS As Michigan State University moved into the twenty-first century, it became clear that the university remained committed to its original core values while stretching and shifting in ways that upheld those original values. The state university with eighty-three county offices now had more active international partnerships than local. The student population represented more countries than Michigan counties. Agricultural sciences were still concerned with crops, but making a rapid shift to research on plants as fuel and plastics, rather than food. Departments, colleges, and other higher education institutions once seen as competitors were now collaborators. Undergraduate students, the traditional recipients of information, were increasingly expected to become generators of knowledge. Fundamental assumptions about what constituted a classroom, an academic semester, and definitions of scholarship were being challenged. The contours of the institution that claimed leadership in defining higher education in the nineteenth century were changing as fast as the science and technology on its campus. While globalization is central to redefining higher education for the twenty-first century, it singularly fails to fully account for the many significant factors that have worked together to transform the university into the twenty-first century. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote recendy about rethinking the globalization paradigm, placing it in the even larger context of a skills revolution in a more demanding cognitive age (2008). Taken together, the two paradigms help more fully explain the significant transformative processes affecting the future of higher education. A SIGNATURE PEDAGOGY FOR A NEW COGNITIVE AGE: INTENTIONAL, INTEGRATED, EMBEDDED The term pedagogy was of course coined by Lee Schulman, president emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Schulman noted how distinctive teaching and learning practices in specialized professions such as medicine and law uniquely defined the student learning experience within those professional areas. Might there be signature - distinctive teaching and learning practices - that differentiates a twenty-first-century approach to undergraduate education in this more demanding cognitive age? At Michigan State University, we began to answer that question by identifying noteworthy educational activities that combined our land-grant ethos with connected and purposeful learning, within a global context. As we examined our own best practices, we discovered examples of educational practices and programs that we believed constituted a newly emerging signature for undergraduate education. This new signature can be characterized as discovery-centered, interdisciplinary, integrative, translational, and contextual. …