Louise Monney is a Jamaican-born Canadian who has been a scholar at York University and Brock University. Currently she is a student in the Athabasca University MAIS program. Her study of English has enhanced her enthusiasm for becoming the best writer and poet she can be. She believes poetry is like a “young toddler,” and she wants to nourish it by developing her writing skills. William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, and Alexander Pope are some of her mentors.

Integrated studies is a combination of
arts, humanities, and social sciences:
a combination that applies to many parts
and spans the mind in many forms. It helps
learners’ thoughts grow holistically, critically, and reflectively.
Certainly it plucks thoughts that seek to follow
the path to envisage integrated learning,
while in pursuit of innovative solutions.
Solutions can twist the mind to a broader intellectual continuum.
Yet the broader it gets, the more it incubates in the minds of
nurses, managers, homemakers, supervisors, social workers,
police officers, and religious leaders. And so
it gains this prize of mine to give the mind a ride.
A ton of dimes will not buy you a mind.
Yet thought can land you where you might find your kind.
Count the cost, boy! Integrated studies will transport you
straight to the land of might. Might I say
you have insight to substantiate knowledge and elevate the mind.
Because integrated studies will expose you to a range of
disciplines and create a web of specialized and generalized knowledge.
Any time it will integrate theories, methods, and practices
with the roots of arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Then it will create a web of minds as they reflect
interest and experience in the community and workplace.
It also drags along administrators, adult educators, teachers, and trainers.
Combinations of this kind will land you a career or
a profession to give you the dime.  A thousand dimes
will be worth the time in integrated studies, which I will not decline.

Louise Monney’s poem was submitted in response to a JIS call for brief works defining the term "integrated studies" in a personal, playful, thoughtful, or otherwise creative way. We continue to welcome such submissions, which can take the form of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction and should be under 500 words.