Abstract:

Integrative learning is described in the literature as a pedagogical approach that supports learners in connecting knowledge across disciplines and in relating academic ideas to lived experience, thereby strengthening meaning-making, transfer, and flexible thinking beyond the classroom. This study examined the impact of integrative literature–science instruction on pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) cross-disciplinary conceptions and creative meaning-making. We used a pre–post design and two complementary assessment tasks that foreground cross-disciplinary sense-making.

First, participants completed the Literature–Science Metaphor Task (LSMT), generating metaphors that compare literature and science to capture how they conceptualized relationships between the two domains. They then completed the Three-Image Story Task (TIST), which required the logical ordering of three seemingly unrelated images and the construction of a coherent narrative connecting them. This served as an indicator of flexible association-making and integrative meaning construction.

The findings point to a discernible shift in participants’ representations across the two tasks. In the LSMT, pre-course responses tended to portray literature and science as distant or contrasting domains, using separation imagery such as “north and south” and describing them as fundamentally different fields. Post-course responses more often framed the two domains as complementary and interconnected, with metaphors such as “two wings of the same bird” and “heart and mind,” emphasizing shared purposes and mutual enrichment. A similar tendency emerged in the TIST: pre-course narratives more frequently preserved a boundary between scientific “truth” and literary fiction, whereas post-course narratives more often integrated scientific ideas into imaginative storytelling in ways that supported narrative coherence and enriched interpretation.

Overall, the pre–post patterns across both tasks suggest a promising shift toward more integrated literature–science thinking and more flexible meaning-making. Participants moved from construing the two domains as separate to framing them as complementary resources for understanding experience, and this shift was expressed consistently in both their metaphors and their narratives. Educationally, this movement is significant because it aligns with the goal of making academic learning more relevant to life by enabling learners to connect disciplinary ideas with interpretation and everyday meaning. Given the pre–post design without a comparison group, the findings indicate an association rather than a confirmed causal effect. Nonetheless, the converging evidence across measures supports continued development and careful evaluation of integrative pedagogy in teacher education, ideally through comparative and longitudinal research.

Keywords:

Integrative learning, Pre-service teachers (PSTs), Literature–science integration, Creative meaning-making, Cross-disciplinary thinking, Creativity.