Fusing learning with reflection
It’s one of the more challenging tasks for college professors: How do you help your students connect what they learn in class with their lives and values, and the wider world that awaits them?
A recently launched collaboration between the Boston College Career Center and Center for Digital Innovation in Learning (CDIL) assists BC faculty members in strengthening the student-formation aspect of their courses. The Integrative Learning Faculty Awards program, which debuted last academic year, provides resources for faculty to design classroom experiences that fuse learning with reflection.
Four faculty members received the initial Integrative Learning awards in the 2025-2026 academic year, and there are five in this year’s cohort.
The awards—also supported by the University Council on Teaching, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and Student Affairs—are open to faculty members across all disciplines, note organizers, especially those whose courses may not traditionally focus on career readiness and student formation: Among the recipients have been faculty teaching classes in history, sociology, Italian, environmental studies, and psychology and neuroscience.
Students who took the Integrative Learning program-supported classes last spring reported higher levels of engagement, a stronger ability to identify career-aligned goals, and greater confidence in connecting their academic work to future professional goals.
While the program is still undergoing development, organizers say, the response from faculty recipients and their students has been encouraging thus far. The initiative also illustrates how seemingly disparate branches of the BC organizational tree team up to support both undergraduate formation and faculty development.
Career Center Director Rachel Greenberg (Lee Pellegrini)
“Fortunately, Boston College has a long tradition of formative education that helps students think beyond the scope of a specific major or discipline,” said Career Center Director Rachel Greenberg, co-founder of the Integrative Learning Faculty Awards program. “It’s more critical than ever for undergraduates to be able to understand and articulate how the skills they are learning in their courses are preparing them for life after college. The more students are able to connect their classroom learning to their lives beyond the classroom, the more engaged they will be in their learning.”
CDIL Director of Digital Learning Innovation & AI John FitzGibbon
“When a potential employer asks students to discuss their meaningful college experiences, they want to hear what they found challenging, what helped them to see new possibilities, gain new understanding about themselves and the world,” said CDIL Director of Digital Learning Innovation & AI John FitzGibbon, who also organizes the program. “Being able to tell those stories is a very important skill—and it’s something they should learn as undergraduates. We know Boston College faculty members are committed to being excellent teachers. This program can help them design courses in such a way that they enable students to bring their whole selves, to think deeply and describe cogently their foundational experiences in college.”
Greenberg added, “It’s something faculty members can add to their CV, to show how they’re supporting their own growth. We’re not asking them to do anything radically different—just to be more intentional and explicit in encouraging students to connect their academics to their own lives and sense of purpose in the world.”
At the center of integrative learning, noted Greenberg and FitzGibbon, are the famous “three questions” of Ignatian discernment that animate Jesuit education: What brings me joy? What am I good at? Who does the world need me to be? Integrating these questions into the curriculum, they said, prompts students to move from asking “What do I want to do?” to “What am I called to be?”
Associate Professor of Sociology Joshua Seim (Lee Pellegrini)
Associate Professor of Sociology Joshua Seim, one of the previous recipients, decided to fine-tune his Sociology of Health and Illness course, which asks students to think critically about inequality, health, and medicine. Although the class had an end-of-semester reflection component, Seim felt he could make integrative thinking a more prominent and regularly occurring feature.
“I wanted students to extend course theories beyond the classroom and into their past and anticipated personal experiences. With the Integrative Learning program, I came up with the idea for a sequence of reflection assignments designed to prepare students for an end-of-semester conversation with a relative stranger about their future.”
Among the tools Seim utilized was the BC Alumni Association’s EagleExchange mentoring platform, which facilitates dialogue between BC alumni and current students. “I hadn’t imagined using something like EagleExchange in a sociology course, but the idea immediately clicked as a way to support a more ambitious final project.”
The collaboration with CDIL and the Career Center helped Seim think more deliberately “about how reflection could build toward a meaningful culminating experience.
“The Career Center is a valuable pedagogical resource for faculty, not just a place to refer students. Their staff helped me think through course design and learning goals, while CDIL helped me envision how these ideas could be implemented online. Rather than offering a cookie-cutter model, the collaboration emphasized customization through conversation, which made the final design much stronger.”
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Professor of History Conevery Valencius (Caitlin Cunningham)
Professor of History Conevery Valencius directs the Neponset River Lab, a collaborative team of graduate and undergraduate students who create an interactive historical map of places along the estuary of the Neponset. She used her award to design a new course in which students learn about the connections between the river and American history and create more material for “Mapping the Neponset River’s History,” which is hosted on the Neponset River Watershed Association website. The Integrative Learning program funded appearances by guest speakers and class trips to the Neponset and elsewhere, she said, and enabled her to craft a big-picture aspect to the class.
“Thanks to the insights of Career Center and CDIL, I was able to create a course to support humanities students in thinking not only about the subject matter, but about their trajectory after Boston College,” Valencius explained. “I wanted to construct class experiences that would help people in my class build skills, confidence, vocabulary, and a sense of moral purpose in translating their work with us into their future jobs and careers.”
Valencius was heartened by how much her students encouraged and taught one another: One used his experience at Carroll School of Management Career Advising Resources to help others hone resume language, and seniors assisted first-year students in crafting self-introductions.
“Funding from CDIL and the Career Center transformed this class,” she said, “and it has helped me bring more explicit career reflections and skills into my other teaching.”
Connell School of Nursing Associate Professor of the Practice Beth McNutt-Clarke (Caitlin Cunningham)
Another recipient, Beth McNutt-Clarke, an associate professor of the practice in the Connell School of Nursing, focused on building career readiness and integrative learning into her capstone clinical course for seniors.
“It’s the perfect time and opportunity to give students a chance to reflect and derive meaning from their years at Boston College, and also to be more aware of and use the incredible resources available to them through the Career Center,” she said. “I had the students use the Big Interview platform to practice their interviewing skills, which is so important—a number of them said it was very timely and provided valuable feedback to them to ensure their job interviews reflected their strengths.”
Information on the Integrative Learning program is available at cdil.bc.edu/programs