Student Centered Education Feasible Levels of Curricular Integration Received for publication, November 21, 2010; accepted November 23, 2010 Manuel Joa ˜ o Costa From the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS), School of Health Sciences, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal Keywords: curriculum design development and implementation, curriculum development, integration of biochemistry into other areas including diversity and women-s studies, integration of courses, learning and curriculum design. Many students struggle to interconnect biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB) contents taught in separate classes or to relate BMB to what they learn in other courses. Such students lack the necessary perspective to perceive the intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary ‘‘bonds’’ of BMB. In other words used before in this jour- nal [1], they are unable to see the tertiary and quaternary structure of BMB. As teachers of BMB, we must strongly consider how to change this if we wish our students to understand what we want them to learn. Integration offers an opportunity to help students make connections, to learn better how to scaffold and organize their BMB. Research on how people learn shows us that deep learn- ing and expertise in any discipline relies on an adequate organization of knowledge [2]. Science academies and scientific societies insistently call for interdisciplinary integration in undergraduate sci- ence education [3, 4]. However, moving from plans to action is not trouble-free. It will demand strong commit- ment from a large number of faculty of multiple depart- ments. It will require coherent mapping and articulation of courses, topics, examples, and assessments. Even at the level of individual courses, programs will need to be rewritten, classes reorganized, and materials reinvented. No wonder teachers vacillate before institutional announcements of large scale curricular integration reforms. Still, more and better integration will always be good news for student-centered education and should thus be strongly encouraged. A feasible pathway toward integration would help and, in this regard, the levels of protein structure provide an inspiring metaphor. No biochemist or teacher of BMB would describe a protein as either ‘‘having structure or not.’’ Amidst all their complexity and diversity, the structural organization of proteins develops progressively, a few steps at a time. Primary and secondary structures are essential for higher levels of folding and, ultimately, to the architecture and biological function of the whole macromolecule. Interdisciplinary integration relates to curricular structure. Therefore, perhaps it makes sense to look at integration also as a feature with levels of progressive complexity. Integration at the proximal scale may be as important as integration at the scale of the whole curriculum. Conse- quently, curricular integration should not be seen as an ‘‘on-or-off’’ feature, like a dipole. We should perhaps let go of the idea that curricula are ‘‘integrated or not.’’ Picturing different levels in curricular integration may be an interesting idea, but what should these levels be? A very interesting model [5] is a ‘‘ladder of integration’’ with 11 steps and four conceptual levels. The main cur- ricular levels are (i) absolutely no interaction between courses or faculty: courses are designed by individual faculty in isolation who have no awareness about what students are being exposed to elsewhere; (ii) presence of some form of articulation: courses are still designed in isolation, but faculty are aware of what is being dis- cussed in courses happening simultaneously; (iii) joint preparation of courses by faculty from different disci- plines—the leap from the previous level is that faculty collaborate actively, have common interdisciplinary goals and introduce coherent changes in their courses to achieve those goals; (iv) interdisciplinary courses in the true sense: a multidisciplinary faculty team prepares, teaches, and assesses the course. In the most sophisti- cated level of integration, the names of disciplines may no longer be visible in course designations for example, biochemistry can be pivotal in a course designated ‘‘cells and molecules.’’ Picturing integration by levels is empowering since and makes integration feasible. If we consider the ‘‘primary integration’’ of a curriculum, the way courses are linearly displayed in a program, then the ‘‘secondary integration’’ would be that neighboring course establish interactions and thus benefit mutually from what students are learn- ing next-door. Clearly, the secondary level of integration * To whom correspondence should be addressed. Medical Education Unit, School of Health Sciences, Gualtar Campus, Braga 4710-057. Tel.: þ351253604805; Fax: þ351253604849. E-mail: mmcosta@ecsaude.uminho.pt. This paper is available on line at http://www.bambed.org DOI 10.1002/bmb.20484 155 Q 2011 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology BIOCHEMISTRY AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY EDUCATION Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 155–156, 2011