General Education, Advising, and Integrative Learning

Students' level of engagement with general education and their grasp of its goals are a problem at many institutions. Academic advising, which is often viewed as having the “signpost” function of directing students to the completion of their course requirements, has the potential instead to be a place where students learn to approach general education with intentionality and especially to see how they can fit its pieces together to form an integrated whole greater than the sum of its parts. Since this will be very difficult (albeit rewarding) work for students, inducing them to engage with it is as challenging as inducing them to engage with any other aspect of general education. A partial solution could lie in treating advising as coursework in its own right, an integral part of general education rather than external to it. This proposal creates challenges for advisers and costs for institutions—which are worth meeting if the institutions highly value integrative learning.