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Remember when you were a new born baby, you were learning and growing on your
own by observing and imitating what you saw, heard, touched and felt around
you. At that time you were using your innate learning abilities and you were
doing pretty well. Then we sent you to school where you had to learn what you
were told and not what came natural to you. You also had to learn their way
which was not natural to you. So you began to fall behind and got blamed for not
learning and even got branded as learning disabled.
At the Center for Integrative Learning we do not do that to you. We in fact want you to
continue using your innate learning abilities and for those abilities to continue
manifesting we bring the world to you in its totality not in bits and pieces. You
thus end up becoming a versatile knowledgeable person who enjoys learning
and growing thus becoming a life long learner and also loose much life’s stress
in the process.
In order to bring the world to you in its totality we integrate all we have learned from
times immemorial to now. This looks like a monumental task only because we
are used to seeing it all spread out in bits and pieces broken up into subjects,
specialties and sub-specialties. But if we integrate everything we know
chronologically giving also the circumstances under which those discoveries
were made, we end up presenting an interesting story of human evolution which
is beside being interesting also turns out to be not so lengthy. Additionally, as we
take out all the minutia and the redundancies, the concepts and skills, which
drive our knowledge and our world, end up being even fewer? Science, for
instance, via this process ends up consisting of only 150 concepts and skills
which if learned first in a hands-on fashion in lab setting make the whole of
science easy to learn navigate through. Same happens to our knowledge of art,
music, humanities, sociology, psychology and economics etc. They too shrink
and when we merge their essence with that of science, we end up getting a
holistic collage of practically the whole of our functional knowledge easy to learn,
master and use.
Because to this integrative process, we offer only five courses as follows:
1. How to set up and maintain a functional science lab. Not a lab for chemistry,
physics or biology but an all purpose lab. This starts you on the path to becoming
a scientist and a lab person. This course also opens doors to all science based
jobs and careers. Persons trained via this course can also help improve
science education in our schools and colleges;
2. A basic and applied course in Microbiology which is the root of all that we know now in
biology including biochemistry, physiology, molecular biology, genetics,
biotechnology and genetic engineering, and on the applied side about food,
pharmaceutical, cosmetic and a host of fermentation industries producing not just
wine and beer but also alcohol as fuel and fermented foods such a yogurt and
many others, plus sanitation, water purification and sewage disposal including
environmental issues and their control, medical and paramedical professions,
including treatment and prevention of infectious diseases plus the exploration
of extraterrestrial space and the biology if any of other planets. The application
and opportunities provided by this subject are endless.
Unfortunately, the biggest disservice the academia, specially the Microbiologists have
done to the society is to make Microbiology a specialty subject and take it
out of the public awareness which is adding to our health care costs because the
public is now not practicing simple means of hygiene to prevent infections and
other diseases and thereby adding to our mounting health care cost becoming a
drain on our already stressed economy. This is such a drain on our economy that
we often have to take funds away from other important services such as
education to just meet the rising health care costs; >
3. How science, art, and humanities including religion, sociology, anthropology,
psychology and economics interrelate and how this sort of integrative learning
and knowing becomes a recipe for meaningful living and life long growing;
4. How to do research which is a system and not the haphazard way much research is
now being done, especially by the beginning unprepared students who are
brought in to connect with an on-going research activity without ever knowing or
even taught how to do research. They thus feel euphoric that they are doing
research but in fact they are not. In many cases they are just a couple of extra pair
of hands to do the nitty-gritty busy work of someone’s research and in fact are
quite helpless when it comes to finding, planning and designing their own. This is
a big void for the student and we try to fill that void by showing them step by step
how research is done. Simultaneously we either assign them a research project
of their own or guide them to design one of their own. It is the groping with that
research project where the methodology to do research develops and becomes a
functional reality.
5. Professional development courses and workshops for teachers. Most if not all of the
teachers currently teaching in our schools and colleges are the products of the
fragmented mode of teaching and learning. They thus teach in a
compartmentalized fashion teaching subjects or disciplines but not in an
integrative fashion leaving the integration and understanding part to the students
who, due to their limited background, have hard time doing the required sort of
integration. Learning thus suffers plus the fragmented mode of teaching is also
expensive and time consuming. The integrative form of teaching resolves this
dilemma enabling a teacher to teach better and faster with retention and
administrators to become conservative in the allocation of time, space and
resources. Being an integrative center of learning, we are recommending that all
teachers, not just the specialty teachers teaching certain subjects need to take
such courses and workshops.
Collectively these five courses are the seeds which set the stage for life long learning
making a person versatile, creative and self reliant.
An unexpected outcome of this form of integrative teaching is a new form of Therapy that I
call Technotherapy™. The way this works is that when the stress of “not knowing”
which haunts most everyone is removed, the knowledgeable person feels
empowered and self assured instead of being depressed or suffering from ever
expanding anxiety attacks and low self esteem.
For further information on class schedule and applicable fees contact the center at:
Center for Integrative Learning
729 S. Western Avenue, Chicago Illinois USA 60612
Phone: 312-243-7716; Fax: 312-243-2041
E-mail: info@centerforintegrativelearning.org
Center for Integrative Learning is a Division of the International Foundation of
Microbiology, a not for profit 501(c)(3) organization.
DONATE TO SUPPORT THIS INNOVATIVE APPROCH TO TEACHING AND
ELARNING. It will save countless amounts of time and money to the current and
coming generations of human kind.
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