Towards a Scholarship of Integration: Lessons from Four Cases

Abstract

. His research interests relate to engineering design cognition and instruction, and helping teachers build their own design pedagogical content knowledge, create their own video-based design teaching portfolios, and do integrated STEM instruction using design challenges with their students.c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Towards a Scholarship of Integration:Lessons from Four Cases AbstractThe purpose of this theory paper is to illustrate possible approaches to the scholarship of integration and explore features, challenges and outcomes of these approaches. Among the forms of scholarship -i.e., discovery, teaching and learning, integration, and application -the scholarship of integration emphasizes bringing together otherwise isolated knowledge by making generative connections within and across different perspectives and disciplines. These connections lead to new insights and language, and place specialized knowledge in a broader context, often revealing patterns that can be useful to specialists and non-specialists.Some argue that this form of scholarship is becoming more central to academic work because it is better equipped for building interdisciplinary partnerships, developing frameworks that transcend disciplinary paradigms, and responding to complex issues at the individual and societal level. For engineering education, this type of scholarship can provide a mechanism for scholars to create new language, theorize and develop conceptual frameworks, and make cross-disciplinary translations for use in discovery, teaching, and practice. Yet, although valuable, the scholarship of integration is relatively underdeveloped and under-theorized.In this paper, we unpack four scholarship of integration cases -focused on systems thinking, innovation, design teaching and learning, and reflection -with a goal of enhancing our collective understanding of this form of scholarship and ways to use it in engineering education. We employ a process of collaborative inquiry to reflect upon, analyze, and highlight common strategies and challenges in each of and across our cases. First, we provide individual accounts of our experiences, lessons learned, and scholarship of integration features, revealed through our collaborative process, that are embedded in our cases. We then highlight a common strategy and three common challenges that emerged through the collaborative inquiry process. We conclude with a question about the implications of this exploration for individual researchers, the community, and policy makers that warrant further conversation.

Laying the Foundations of a Learning Platform for Humanitarian Engineering: Methodological Approach and Results

“…Boyer defines SoI as "serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together and bring new insight to bear on original research" (p. 19) 13 , and adds that it is "interdisciplinary, interpretive, integrative" (p. 21). 13 Additionally, SoI is use-inspired, that is, it pursues the "double quest for fundamental understanding […] and practical considerations" (p. 11) 14 , thus going beyond being just a synthesis of interdisciplinary knowledge and practices.…”

From Entrepreneur to Designer: The Transferable Design Principles of the Entrepreneur

“…An approach that is useful in the development of use-inspired frameworks is the scholarship of integration (SOI) [19]. This approach, based on one of Boyer's four forms of scholarship (discovery, application, integration, teaching) [18], focuses on connecting isolated knowledge within and across perspectives and disciplines, which leads to new insights and language, places specialized knowledge in a broader context, and reveals patterns that are useful to researchers and practitioners.…”

“…Scholarship of integration studies tend to use approaches categorically related to literature reviews (e.g., meta-analysis, systematic literature reviews), potentially mixed with other approaches (e.g., case studies, surveys, verbal protocols) in highly iterative cycles that generate frameworks as byproducts, among other types of outcomes [19,24]. These use-inspired frameworks can help support evidence-based decision making, address practice-related issues of high concern, stimulate reflective practice, enhance teaching [26] as well as create new directions in research and practice [19].…”

“…These use-inspired frameworks can help support evidence-based decision making, address practice-related issues of high concern, stimulate reflective practice, enhance teaching [26] as well as create new directions in research and practice [19]. It is "serious, disciplined work that seeks to interpret, draw together, and bring insight to bear on original research" and aims to fit one's own research and the research of others into larger patterns [18] (p. 19).…”

“…Such a perspective describes entrepreneurship as a set of principles that are applicable to multiple fields and problem spaces. This perspective is developed through a scholarship of integration (SOI), an emerging use-inspired approach grounded on the report Scholarship Reconsidered [18], which consists of placing one's research and the research of others into larger frameworks that can generate re-interpretation of knowledge, while simultaneously opening up new research and practice directions [19]. Here, we propose that a perspective of entrepreneurship as a design philosophy helps align and translate many entrepreneurship concepts and bodies of related literature for a broad array of fields, and in particular for the engineering education space.…”