College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World

by Chris W. Gallagher

Overview

How can universities shape creative, adaptive, integrated learners ready to confront the world? This book's clear-eyed optimism is a challenge to everyone in higher education.

American higher education is being torn apart. Institutions, curricula, courses, and faculty roles are being "unbundled"—broken into constituent parts in the name of efficiency and cost savings. As a result, the college learning experience is fragmented and incoherent, leaving graduates less and less equipped to confront the dire social problems that cause those divisions in the first place.

In College Made Whole, Chris W. Gallagher lays bare the dangers of the dis-integration of the college experience and shows how we can put higher education back together again. The successful colleges and universities of the future, Gallagher argues, will be integrated: coherently and cohesively designed to help students achieve a lifelong learning experience that is more than the sum of its parts.

Pushing back against pernicious dichotomies that frame much discussion of US higher education, Gallagher critiques many of the hottest educational trends, including the overhyping of technological "solutions," rampant adjunctification, the promotion of nondegree credentials as a suitable replacement for college degrees, and the increasingly narrow focus on the vocational aims of a college education. Ivestigating the purposes of higher education historically and today, he suggests audacious proposals to enhance learning, including reorganizing institutions, reordering institutional priorities, redesigning curricula and courses, and rethinking edtech and learning technologies.

Lucidly written and packed with practical recommendations and real student stories, College Made Whole will challenge higher education professionals and policy makers, as well as anyone with a stake in the future of US higher education—which is to say, all of us who inhabit this fragile planet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421432632
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	871 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Chris W. Gallagher is the Vice Chancellor for Global Learning Opportunities and a professor of English at Northeastern University. He is the author of Reclaiming Assessment: A Better Alternative to the Accountability Agenda and the coauthor of Our Better Judgment: Teacher Leadership for Writing Assessment and Teaching Writing That Matters: Tools and Projects That Motivate Adolescent Writers.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Future of Higher Education Is Integration
1. The Many and the One: Integrating Higher Education as a Public Good and a Private Good
2. Depth and Breadth: Integrating Specialized Expertise and Generalized Understanding
3. Inside and Outside: Integrating Classroom Learning and Learning in Other Contexts
4. A Life and a Living: Integrating Liberal Learning and Professional Learning
5. Humans and Machines: Integrating Faculty Expertise and Learning Technologies
6. Now and Then: Integrating Degrees and Lifelong Learning Opportunities
Conclusion. Educating Esther
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

College Made Whole is a terrific rejoinder to many of the currently popular but ill-informed works advocating market-based reforms in higher education. The chapters are solid, coherent, and collectively advance the author's central argument in a logical and systematic way. I especially appreciate the way each chapter offers vignettes, analysis, recommendations for institutions, and suggestions for faculty.
—Charles Dorn, Bowdoin College, author of For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America

Gallagher offers a compelling defense of integrative liberal learning as the best preparation for developing students' capacities to grapple with the unscripted problems of the future. In the process, he provides action steps for promoting conceptual scaffolding and personalized lifelong learning, essential for both individual thriving and our nation's democracy.
—Lynn Pasquerella, President, Association of American Colleges & Universities

College Made Whole presents a powerful argument and a concrete set of recommendations for ways that institutions of higher education can foster more adaptive, integrative learners. The trick? Becoming more adaptive, integrative institutions, connecting the knowledge they generate across fields and with the world beyond. I can think of no more important goal for colleges and universities today.
—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University, author of Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University

The great unbundlers came for our colleges, and now Chris Gallagher has come for the unbundlers, patiently and thoroughly demolishing their view that students will be better served by an open marketplace of credential providers. In reality, education is too important and too complex to be unbundled. We need integration. We need to help students and the public see the ways we are all connected and benefit from robust and dynamic higher education institutions. This book is a necessary corrective to a wayward course.
—John Warner, author of Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

Charles Dorn

College Made Whole is a terrific rejoinder to many of the currently popular but ill-informed works advocating market-based reforms in higher education. The chapters are solid, coherent, and collectively advance the author's central argument in a logical and systematic way. I especially appreciate the way each chapter offers vignettes, analysis, recommendations for institutions, and suggestions for faculty.

John Warner

The great unbundlers came for our colleges, and now Chris Gallagher has come for the unbundlers, patiently and thoroughly demolishing their view that students will be better served by an open marketplace of credential providers. In reality, education is too important and too complex to be unbundled. We need integration. We need to help students and the public see the ways we are all connected and benefit from robust and dynamic higher education institutions. This book is a necessary corrective to a wayward course.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

College Made Whole presents a powerful argument and a concrete set of recommendations for ways that institutions of higher education can foster more adaptive, integrative learners. The trick? Becoming more adaptive, integrative institutions, connecting the knowledge they generate across fields and with the world beyond. I can think of no more important goal for colleges and universities today.

Lynn Pasquerella

Gallagher offers a compelling defense of integrative liberal learning as the best preparation for developing students' capacities to grapple with the unscripted problems of the future. In the process, he provides action steps for promoting conceptual scaffolding and personalized lifelong learning, essential for both individual thriving and our nation's democracy.