Enhancing Undergraduate Education Through the Integration of Learning

Higher education is at its best when students learn not only to acquire knowledge but also to connect it, apply it, and use it to address real challenges. In this book, Glenn Bowen argues that integrative learning is not a peripheral goal of undergraduate education. It is central to preparing students for work, citizenship, and life. Drawing from research and decades of practice, he demonstrates how experiences inside and outside the classroom can help students bridge theory and practice, deepen their learning, and make sense of an increasingly complex world. Particularly compelling is his recognition that service- learning and community-based experiences are not simply enriching opportunities for students. They are powerful ways for students to connect knowledge with action, develop a stronger sense of purpose, and better understand their responsibilities to the communities they are part of. At a time when colleges and universities are being challenged to prepare graduates for an increasingly complex world, this book offers a compelling vision for how more-connected learning can strengthen student success and advance higher education’s public purpose.

This book is an invaluable resource for faculty, staff, and practitioners seeking scholarship and practical application to deepen integrative, reflective, and active learning across curricular and co-curricular spaces. At a time of growing reliance on generative AI, the principles and practices of integrative learning are necessary components of a meaningful higher education experience that enables students to have successful college-to-career development transitions with desirable competencies that reaffirm the value of higher education to society.

Enhancing Undergraduate Education positions integrative learning as a solution to the siloed and transactional approach to learning that is nearly ubiquitous in higher education today. Dr. Bowen’s handy, at-a-glance guidebook adeptly returns experiential learning to its roots of integration and exploration, reopening all the possibilities and promises offered by this kind of education. It highlights the power of integrative learning to educate individuals holistically as professionals and citizens.

Glenn Bowen’s book is destined to become the go-to text for those seeking to understand how genuine learning happens on college campuses. The greatest contribution of this invaluable text is its synthesis of decades of scholarship on experiential and integrative learning into a coherent, practical, and contemporary framework that can guide both educational research and institutional practice in higher education. 

Enhancing Undergraduate Education thoughtfully addresses the important question of how college education might be reconsidered to enable learners to better become integrative thinkers during their undergraduate years. Whether in preparation for careers, community life, or civic participation, young people will increasingly need the ability to negotiate rapid change, emergent circumstances, and wicked problems. To meet this need, Dr. Bowen argues for a curricular response focused on integrative learning—“the ability to connect, synthesize, apply, and reflect meaningfully on knowledge and skills acquired or developed from various contexts and experiences.” Helpfully surveying both theoretical underpinnings and diverse models, he provides practical illustrations of how university leaders and faculty can engage and assess students as meaning makers active in the construction of their own knowledge through a range of learning experiences.