Covid-19 Integrative Learning Resources

Geneseo's GLOBE learning outcomes in integrative learning can be met by students engaged  in distance, remote, and virtual learning, including those in quarantine or isolation. Integrative learning practices can complement or even replace existing curriculum where changing circumstances, such as restriction on travel, prevent existing plans from being carried out. For example:

• Import or adapt this Canvas-based Self-Reflection module, designed by Dr. Jess Fenn and Study Abroad.
• Explore sources for remote internships and community-engaged learning, such as 9 Places to volunteer online and nonprofit community time-sensitive COVID-19 needs.
• Use Community Development Specialist Nicole Manapol's Service-Learning Course Design Framework to help you re-design in-person courses with service learning for online contexts.
• Draw from our Integrative & Applied Learning Resources to support you as you adapt courses.
• Get in touch with us via Google Form to tell us about your needs, such as a community partner, self-reflection, or ways to help your students complete applied learning in the absence of community partners.

Tips for Adopting Integrative Practice (Integrative Inquiry, Application of Knowledge, Self-Reflection)

• Self-reflection tasks offer excellent ways for students to connect knowledge from an existing course to other disciplinary areas and/or to community and civic contexts. Self-reflection works best when connected to syllabus/discipline/college learning outcomes. It can take the form of a single assignment such as a short reflective essay or video; a module in which students iteratively engage in articulating what they have learned, why that knowledge is significant both to them and to one or more other communities, and how such learning will transform their actions going forward; a larger project (e.g. an electronic portfolio) via which students narrate and analyze their path through learning a particular topic and connect it to development goals, whether related to their major, their career plans, or their personal growth.

To nimbly add self-reflection, use this Canvas-based Self-Reflection module, adapted from Dr. Jess Fenn/Study Abroad. 

• Case study work can be completed remotely, whether in conversation with community partners or by using existing data sets and research. (The University at Buffalo has some great examples.) A faculty member can either identify an existing problem/challenge related to a course's discipline or assign students working in smaller, virtual discussion pods to identify such problems/challenges. Students can then apply what they have learned in this course - and, explicitly, other disciplines - that might help them solve the problem, and produce an assignment such as a report in which they offer potential solutions (including areas for further research) and reflect on their strengths. (Such solutions-oriented assignments can also effectively incorporate self-reflection.) This approach involves students in the application of knowledge as well as integrative inquiry.

To nimbly add case study work, adopt or adapt the Digital Online Modules for Environmental Studies (DOMES) created by Drs. Karleen West and Suann Yang and based in KnightScholar.

• Harnessing students' liberal arts knowledge by turning them into student-teachers and teacher-students within a class that now exists online allows them to deepen their own and others' knowledge of an existing course: we learn not only by doing but by articulating - and by teaching. Ask students to identify a key topic on the syllabus which they feel they can explain to others via making a synthetic connection to knowledge gained outside the classroom: in a minor, general education course, work-related or co-curricular context, etc. Assign each student the task of explaining the course topic by creating online materials - whether text, audio or visual - that teach the knowledge that's new to the course, explain the connection to the syllabus topic, and identify a link to syllabus or discipline learning outcomes.