What is faith integration in higher education, and why does it matter?
In this video, originally featured on CCCU’s Faith and Learning website, Provost and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs Alison Noble, Ph.D., explains how integrating faith and academics helps students develop as whole people. By connecting intellectual growth with spiritual formation, this approach prepares students for careers, graduate study and meaningful engagement with the world.
Approaching education in a way that embraces faith and learning and the discipline enables our students to move forward into the world whether that's into a career or whether it's into graduate school or whether it's into one of the professional disciplines like medical school or becoming a lawyer as whole people.
Sometimes when people think about faith integration, they think about, “I need to have a devotion before class.”
And that's not really what we're talking about with faith integration. We're really talking about the interplay, the dialectic that occurs between the ways that faith informs the way we think about the world and that our disciplines inform the way we think about the world. Faith integration really means the way that we function as whole people. People who have hearts and minds and spiritual lives that all are a part of our character formation and our disciplinary formation. So, we're talking about ways that we approach our disciplines that we approach teaching or as students we approach learning, we approach writing, we approach our interactions, we approach the way we think about the big questions of life in ways that take into consideration the expertise that we have from our disciplines, and the way that our faith informs our thinking.
We don't want to just educate people's minds.
We want people to come to the university or to the college and leave with people who have full hearts and full minds—having experienced what it is to have cognitive dissonance between things that cause tension and understanding that part of our learning and part of our discovery is learning that that's okay. And that's actually an important part of what it means to be a Christian thinker and a Christian writer and a Christian doctor and a Christian lawyer is to recognize that we have an ongoing conversation between the things that we learn in the way that our faith informs us and that the world informs us.
This video originally published on CCCU’s Faith & Integration and is republished here with permission.
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