Holistic Education Case Study

PART (a)
(a) Fully explain the 4 enunciated propositions therein, which Educators must pay attention to, in order to counter the over emphasis on the cognitive domain. (15)
Humans are lifelong learners. “Holistic approaches to teaching and learning recognize the connectedness of mind, body and spirit…” (Deewr, 2009). The various learning styles and the needs of evolving human beings’ responsiveness impact on the holistic education. Holistic education’s principle is to prepare children to meet the challenges of living and learning. It involves the children learning to be humans and growing up. Such an education firmly believes that young people should learn about healthy relationships, pro-social behaviour, emotional and social development.

Emotion is vital in education because it controls attention of learners which in turn drives learning and memory. However, it has been seen that emotion are rarely integrated comfortably into the core curriculum and classroom. It is important to take into consideration that with physical and cognitive development, every learner grows throughout phases of emotional development. This is why, John Dewey claim that “education of the whole child” is crucial.

The holistic approach focuses on the importance of understanding and dealing with all social issues. When promoting emotional development, holistic approach provides scope to target those learners with particular emotional problems. A systematic assessment (Lister Sharpe et al, 2000) claimed that school approaches can be very influential means of tackling emotional and social issues. The review was meant to promote mental wellbeing in schools (Wells et al, 2003) led to conclude that “the most robustly positive evidence was obtained for programmes that adopted a whole school

Pedagogy is important because it demonstrate how the teaching and learning occurs. Students must build up their own understandings through teachers’ and their own considered learning experiences.
Teacher’s subject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge are vital to good teaching and student understanding (Buchmann, 1982, 1983; Tobin & Garnett, 1988). In Shulman's theoretical framework, teachers need to master two types of knowledge: content and knowledge of the curricular development. Teacher must integrate teaching strategies that will help students to assimilate knowledge such as supportive classroom environment, recognition of difference and connectedness to the wider world. This will boost up student’s confidence and contributes to their sense of function for being at school.
Good teachers know the content, know how to give explanation, expect and demand high level of performance from learners. These teachers are great performers that rivet their students’ attention. However, great teachers engineer learning experiences that eventually make the students connect experiences with diverse areas of knowledge in a significant