Abstract
The author employs grounded theory to investigate the teaching process of an interdisciplinary general education course at A University as a case. The author finds that under the condition of rather concrete relations between the subject of a major-based course and that of an elected general education course, if the major course is taught with a certain breadth and depth, students would adopt the strategy of using knowledge from their major course in their general education course and using knowledge from their general education course to reflect on the major course. This kind of “two-way insertion” learning model reflects the mechanism of mutual facilitation between major education and general education on the course level. This conclusion has important insights into university general education reforms and general education course building and management.
Notes
The code HJFW represents the Chinese character string before coding and is used in the later three-level coding to introduce original data.
Integration of course knowledge is a dimension of “curriculum integration.” The other three dimensions are: integrating personal experience, knowledge, and meaning systems, value integration between different individuals, and integrating course design (see Beane, Citation2003).
Treating general education and major education in stages refers to the first two years of undergraduate mainly studying general education and later studying major education. The main problem is not being able to look after individual differences of students and general education not being continued from start to finish (see Chen Citation2006).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hualiang Fang
Hualiang Fang is a lecturer at Law and Business School of Wuhan Institute of Technology.