Wholeness as a developmental goal (original) (raw)

Human Being Development Through Holistic and Complex Approach

Education and New Developments 2019, 2019

Several authors from different disciplines indicate that past and present school education systems are not adapted to a human being's natural development. Instead of accompanying the young human being through the phases of his natural development, the school imposes a training that is out of step in terms of requirements, which tends to restrict several aspects essential to his good development and later to his good functioning. Through the insights of several authors from various disciplines, this paper aims to propose theoretical and multidimensional approaches to justify the implementation of a holistic and complex curriculum in order to offer equitable, inclusive and quality education to young human beings. It concludes with practical implications and recommendations based on these proposals.

Character, civic, and social emotional learning education

LiberiaUniversitaria, 2020

Increasingly we are hearing calls to move beyond test scores and to enhance our focus on the education of the whole child. OECD [1] has laid out a framework for what type of education we want to have by 2030 in which they centered their vision of whole child development. Research in child human development and the neuroscience of learning also suggest that we need to expand our focus from academics outcomes (e.g., math and language knowledge) to pro-social outcomes such as personal agency, persistence, and civic engagement [2]). When, however, you look at the structures of schools, there is no clarity as to who owns the policies, procedures, or curriculum associated with educating the whole child. There is confusion as to what we mean by whole child and how we measure of our success in educating the whole child. The purpose of this essay is to describe three areas of practice that effectively address the development of the whole child, a) character education, b) civic education, and c) social emotional learning and discuss the ways in which they are different and similar. It will end with a discussion on the challenges faced in implementing such programs and demonstrating their value.

Human Being Development: Research Protocol for a Holistic and Complex Review on the Social Dimension

2019

The purpose of this article is to lay the foundation for the building blocks of the social development of human beings in a contemporary democratic society; more broadly, it focuses on the research protocol with used to conduct a holistic and complex review on the social dimension of the human being. From a cross-reading of the thoughts of ancient and contemporary authors, a number of structural, conceptual and dynamic elements related to this subject emerged. This article, based on Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach, establishes a first foundation of knowledge synthesis on the social dimension of human beings. Initial Warnings. Current knowledge of the requirements of good development and good functioning of human beings allows for the definition of new guidelines to redirect our education systems towards the implementation of education and training programs that allow every human to better know oneself and to realize optimally their potential. We want to put into perspective the knowledge generated by several authors to synthesize their approaches and draw the guidelines for this new orientation that is necessary and more respectful of human development. This article is a proposal for the basis of work on which the experts of different fields mentioned in the text will be able to continue the reflection and co-build this holistic framework with us. More than ever, we believe in the importance of this exercise to redefine humanism and education that truly places human beings in what they are, and is most fundamental and in the optimal conditions for them to succeed.

Person-Centered Education

2015

Education, together with family and culture, is one of the fundamental building blocks of the social construction of reality. It is more and more evident that we need a paradigm change in the field of education in order to enable people to deal effectively with the mounting challenges facing humanity. This retooling needs to start with our frames of reference. We need to create a new paradigm of education in order to enable education to serve people’s needs and to have relevance in public service, social responsibility and sustainable governance and development. Education is one of the main narratives to prepare new generations to be an active and constructive part of the society and is one of the main carriers of values. Values can be implicit or explicit. In Person-Centered Education (PCE), also called student-centered education, values are made explicit to facilitate students to have a critical and proactive role and an effective training to become fully functioning members of th...

Peoplehood Requires a Full Life

The Peoplehood Papers 30, 2021

“It takes a village to raise a child,” says the African proverb—and educating for peoplehood takes a full life. In The Kuzari, R. Yehuda Halevi defines prayer as “the seed of time and its fruit.” Prayer is both the potential and the final product. Similarly, I would define “Peoplehood Consciousness” both as what we are doing when we are involved with Peoplehood and as the final product we are trying to create. The sort of life experience that creates Peoplehood contains four critical stages: 1) knowing, 2) acknowledging, 3) feeling part, and 4) building partnership, each of which may contain a variety of elements and layers. In this article, I will lay out the pedagogical thinking underlying each stage, using examples from my own experience in the field of Jewish Peoplehood.

Learning to Live with Religious Plurality in Personhood Formation

Philosophy Study, 2014

Every person has a more or less articulated worldview that I define in its most brief form as "a view on life". That might be a religious view and could be with or without a God-concept, but the religious domain forms a sub-domain of the embracing domain of worldview. We can make a distinction between organized and personal worldviews. I will argue that pedagogically speaking schools should be aware of the value and relevance of worldview education especially focusing on the development of the students' personal worldview as an integral part of their personhood formation ("Bildung"). Worldview and/or religion are part of the public and the social domain, although not undisputed, and that is why I make a plea for worldview education as part of citizenship education. Already in the school as an embryonic society (John Dewey) students should learn to live together with differences and this should also include the ability to recognize differences between worldview/religious. The results of empirical research projects in the Netherlands and also from a European Commission granted project "Religion in Education" have shown that students really want to learn from and are interested in the worldview of their fellow students. They are also in favor of schools where they can meet a diversity of worldviews among teachers and students. Dialogue and encounter are important to them. So, worldview education as part of citizenship education can foster students to learn to live peacefully together.

Who Am I? Transforming Our Understanding of Identity and Moral Education

Education Sciences, 2019

When I was invited to edit a special issue of Education Sciences on the theme of "Moral education and identity", I saw an opportunity both to gain a better understanding of how scholars across a range of disciplines construed the task of moral education in terms of identity and-I can now confess-to defend the claim that moral education, when properly understood, depends upon an account of identity which is quite different from that which dominates the social sciences, the media and popular opinion. My aim here is to provide such an account and, thereby, to suggest how we might construe the challenge of moral education in a world, and at a time, in which self-centered, shortsighted and narrow-minded thinking dominates much of the socio-political landscape. I argue that the dominant view of identity-that our own identities are constituted by those collectives and institutions with which we identify-actually reinforces narratives which bind us to tribal perspectives-in national, religious and cultural terms-in which we increasingly see ourselves and others in terms of who is "in" and who is "out". I propose a relational view of identity in which each person sees her/himself as "one among others", where the relationships in question both bind us in familiar and concrete ways to others-i.e., other persons but also other objects in the world-and transcend the boundaries imposed by belonging to this or that nation, religion, culture, or tribe. This idea of what it means to be a person goes hand-in-hand with a framework for moral education which is also both concretely relational and appropriately transcendent. Put briefly, we need to create the conditions in which young people engage one another dialogically in taking responsibility for tackling what I term "the Big Questions", including: "What do I/we stand for?", "What/who really matters?", "What kind of society/world do I/we want to live in (and leave for future generations)?", and "What is my place in the world?". (In taking this approach, I aim to address at least some of the questions posed in the original call for submissions for this special issue, as outlined at the Special Issue "Moral Education and Identity").