Integration in Writing
Almost the first thing one realizes about studying something experientially is that everything is connected with everything else. Friends World attempts to recognize this. Even though the guidelines support the division of your Portfolio into credit sections and your life into semesters, there is also an understanding that nothing happens in a vacuum, and that some integration is not only necessary but desirable. Integration of concepts is not only a central part of the reflection process that is an important part of a learning cycle, but also part of the way humans synthesize and create in general.
Original ideas integrate with external influences in your head; the academic and personal are integrated in your documentation; research involves integration of various sources and viewpoints; the paragraphs in formal prose writing flow into one another for easier reading and understanding; the entire Portfolio is sort of an integration of process and product, culminating (not coincidentally) in the overarching, reflective INTEGRATIVE ESSAY (A.3).
Always search for connections and overlappings; that is the way the world works.
Workshop Discussion Sparks
- How to integrate the "personal" and the "academic"
- How to integrate experience and research, etc.
Inspired and Creative
- Keep integration in mind when putting together your Portfolio. At least some of your credit areas will probably have something to do with each other; keep referring to the others as you work each one out. The same techniques that make an essay flow (i.e.-- connecting the paragraphs) will make your whole Portfolio flow (by connecting the sections of it).
- Try intgrating the events of each day with those of the next.
- Remember that your life is all one life, and your studies all relate to each other through you over time. Try
- integrating the studies of each semester with those of the next.
- integrating the studies at each Center you attend with those at the next.
- Ask yourself questions at the end of one Portfolio to be answered in the next.
Rigorous Training
- On a slightly smaller scale, do the same project, but just within the context of your Learning Plan. Your life is one holistic life, and the plans you make and the things you do cannot be completely separate from each other, if only because the same person is involved in doing all of them. Your Learning Plan can reflect this while still clearly spelling out the categories of credits, etc.
AAAAAGGGHHHH!
- Possible help for things that don't seem to connect when you want them to:
- maybe they just won't connect-- that happens, too.
- sometimes a third topic can be introduced to sort of "mediate" between two areas that you feel have something to do with each other but won't quite meet in the middle.
See Also
Contribute to the Portfolio Resource Guide!!!
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