What happens when perspectives gather?

When scholars from sundry disciplines gather around one worthy issue, interdisciplinarity begins to occur. Content, method, context, and outcomes play a part.

What else contributes?


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(C) Laura Springer

Laura's Writings by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Is it possible to integrate faith and science?

Viewed under the sun, the two worlds seem so vastly different that correspondence and coherence seem impossible apart from disrespectful compromise.

Yet, if God created...

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(C) Laura Springer

Laura's Writings by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Do we create truth?

Is Truth out there, static, waiting to be discovered or is reality more complex? Could it be that truth is static, dynamic, and being created?

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(C) Laura Springer

Laura's Writings by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Leveraging the gift of adaptation

Seeking reality through truth-determined adjustment and justified response, our common responses, given and decided, savor revelation, moving toward the Creator’s telos, fulfilling well-lived imago Dei.

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Informants

• Charles Darwin, The Origin Of Species
• David L. Wolfe, “The line of demarcation between integration and pseudointegration” in The Reality of Christian Learning: Strategies for Faith-Discipline Integration
• Ronald R. Nelson, “Faith-discipline integration: Compatibilist, reconstructionalist, and transformationalist strategies” in The Reality of Christian Learning: Strategies for Faith-Discipline Integration

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(C) Laura Springer

Laura's Writings by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

For all our powers, mystery remains

change takes time

furtive detail
watched over years
connections remain obscured

truth finally revealed
or distorted

partial knowledge
inability

bits finally coalesce
awe shapes understanding

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Informants

• Darwin’s Origin of Species, Introduction and and chapter 1 (Variation Under Domestication): Librivox recording
• scan of Interdisciplinary: Essays from the Literature by William H. Newell

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(C) Laura Springer

Laura's Writings by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Dancing on the space between the disciplines

your POV enriches fallow ground
unrecognized potential

keys clarify reality
mysteries wonder

dialectical arrives at truth unseen
enrapturing souls

extended understanding frees
curiosity given tenure

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Informants

• “Assessing Interdisciplinary Learning Outcomes” by A. F. Repko, University of Texas Arlington (pdf)
• “A Grand Unified Theory of Interdisciplinarity” by L. J. Davis, Chronicle of Higher Education, 53.40 (2007) (pdf)
• “Interdisciplinarity: An Introduction” by M. Seipel, Truman State University
• “Negotiating a passage between interdisciplinary boundaries” by K. Wissoker, Chronicle of Higher Education, 46.32 (2000)
• “Collaborative efforts: Promoting interdisciplinary scholars” by Pfirmian, Collins, Lowes, and Michaels, Chronicle of Higher Education, 51.23 (2005)

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(C) Laura Springer

Laura's Writings by Laura Springer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Hunting his Glory...Everywhere

Integrative Thought plays on the heuristics at the core of human knowing, beginning with idea saturation, allowing the soul to discover Jesus’ glory, organically declared.

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Informant

• “Integrative Thinking, Synthesis, and Creativity” by David J. Sill

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Question: What’s the point of general education?

Anyone who have gone to college took General Education. Honestly, we have forgotten most of it.

What are we supposed to do with it now?

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Informants

• General Education
• Creation Theology
• Logos Theology

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Towards defining a way of understanding

ICT: Making sense of life and truth in accordance with the subordination of all things to Jesus, for the purpose of logical and practical wisdom.

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(C) Laura Springer

Making sense of the vast array

• Truth is necessarily Christ-centered.
• Proper knowledge is connected and comprehensive.
• Proper knowing is creative, critical, and collaborative.

Logical Basis: Assumptions under a theory of everything

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Informants

• Enduring understandings and big ideas for Integrative Christian Thought

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(C) Laura Springer

Fuzzying up the boundaries of knowledge

According to Boyer, integration begins with research at the edges of a discipline and then reaches across to make its place in the intellectual landscape.

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Informant

• Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, by Ernest L. Boyer

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(C) Laura Springer

Assumptions under a theory of everything

• The Logos is the Sovereign Creator and the Ultimate End.
• Humanity is the bearer of the imago Dei.
• Christ, the Logos, is the only Savior.

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Informants

• Integrative thought
• Christian thought

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(C) Laura Springer

Teaching is not a head dump

From Drop Box

Students have a place to be and things to do. They may not know where or what; we’re outfitting the training them for the journey.

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Informants

• Understanding by Design
  
• passenger loading sign at Norwalk Station

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(C) Laura Springer

More mysterious than imagined

Foundational to everything is the relational Trinity, one of whom is only recently corporeal. Everything is a teleological, complex system, centered on the Sovereign Christ.

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Informants

• The Christian View of God and the World, by James Orr
• Industrial Dynamics by Jay Wright Forrester
• My seat-of-the-pants critique of the material assumptions underlying Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

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(C) Laura Springer

Fostering educated learners

Learning doesn’t stop when facts are installed. In reality, it does not start there. Learning starts with seeing reality, distinctions, and connections. Learning comprehends ideas.

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Informant

Ch16: The task of initiating a work of self-reformation

Ch17: Alma mater: A life of learning

Ch18: The idea of the university in scholarly literature

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(C) Laura Springer

Writing is Thinking Together

From the soul’s creative silence, the pondered depths must spring forth--orderly, precise, attractive--for expansion, correction, completion. Hiding within, ponderings remain useless navel gazing.

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Informant

Chapter 12: Diffusion of Knowledge Through Publishing

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(C) Laura Springer

Why should Christian colleges teach general education?

Integration begins when the understanding of a subject results in the wholehearted worship of Christ. An ICT* scholar is able to explain this to others.

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Informants

• *ICT: Integrative Christian Thought
• Conceiving the Christian College

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