Academia and industry share a concern for effective knowledge transfer: getting information from the people who harvest and refine it to the people who use it. For example, it's critical to deliver new findings from the researcher to the manufacturer, from the government agency to the field office, from the laboratory to the health practitioner, or from one end of campus to the other.
Knowledge integration (KI) is the creative extension of knowledge transfer. It addresses the questions that emerge when information converges from several sources. The integration of knowledge may be simple or complex. It happens when experts pool their background knowledge to clarify a problem or when specialists collaborate on a transdisciplinary solution. At its most complex, people from transdisciplinary backgrounds team up to imagine and implement innovative ideas.
Knowledge Integration is a unique Honours plan designed to prepare its students for careers as transdisciplinary leaders and skilled generalists who can pioneer crossover solutions and build bridges between specialists. They accomplish this by studying in both the humanities and the sciences, explicitly developing personal syntheses of their transdisciplinary studies, and applying those experiences to problem-solving and design challenges, in teams and alone. By choosing an appropriate focus in their upper years, graduates can also prepare themselves for professional schools, public service and policy-making, or graduate research in their chosen discipline.
There are four key components to the KI plan: breadth, depth, research, and the KI core.
- Breadth The breadth components assure students a balanced foundation of subjects that will support their work in all their other courses.
- Depth Nearly half the courses are elective. A dedicated KI academic advisor helps students pick specialty courses for depth focused on their own interests and career goals.
- Research From the day they arrive, KI students study how we know what we know. What sort of questions does an anthropologist ask? How does a mechanical engineer validate a design? In fourth year, they put it all together in a solo project where each student asks an original question that matters to them, then researches, tests and shares their findings.
- KI Core The Knowledge Integration core supports and links the rest of the plan. This is where students learn and practise the thinking skills, work habits, and key concepts of knowledge integration.
The KI plan encourages, develops and rewards initiative, creativity, reflection, collaboration and the incorporation of experiences beyond the KI classroom. Starting in their first year, KI students learn about the nature and variety of disciplinary specialties, how to characterize a discipline, and how to collaborate effectively with its practitioners. Design projects in first and third years give students problem-solving opportunities where they can apply their skills in integrating knowledge and teams to discover and develop innovative solutions. Meanwhile, each student also studies at least one subject in meaningful depth to build a personal knowledge base and understand first hand the experience of specialization. In their fourth year, KI students all complete solo research projects on transdisciplinary topics of particular interest, a capstone for their entire degree.