Stylus Publishing (VA) Teaching the Whole Student: Engaged Learning With Heart, Mind, and Spirit

Teaching the Whole Student is a compendium of engaged teaching approaches by faculty across disciplines. These inspiring authors offer models for instructors who care deeply about their students, respect and recognize students’ social identities and lived experiences, and are interested in creating community and environments of openness and trust to foster deep-learning, academic success, and meaning-making.The authors in this volume stretch the boundaries of academic learning and the classroom experience by seeking to identify the space between subject matter and a student's core values and prior knowledge. They work to find the interconnectedness of knowledge, understanding, meaning, inquiry and truth. They appreciate that students bring their full lives and experiences—their heart and spirit—into the classroom just as they bring their minds and intellectual inquiry. These approaches contribute to student learning and the core academic purposes of higher education, help students find meaning and purpose in their lives, and help strengthen our diverse democracy through students’ active participation and leadership in civic life. They also have a demonstrated impact on critical and analytical thinking, student retention and academic success, personal well-being, commitments to civic engagement, diversity, and social justice.Topics discussed:Student relationships and community buildingHow teaching the whole student increases persistence and completion ratesHow an open learning environment fosters critical understandingStrategies for developing deep social and personal reflection in experiential education and service learningThe authors of this book remind us in poignant and empirical ways of the importance of teaching the whole student, as the book's title reflects. Review "Comprised of one-part call to action and two parts inspiration, Teaching the Whole Student offers encouragement and practical instructional strategies to college educators who care deeply about teaching and helping students discover meaning and purpose. By thoughtfully combining academic content with students' heart, mind and spirit, each essay author reveals their unique approaches to innovative teaching, stretching the boundaries of learning, and strengthening our diverse democracy."--Jillian Kinzie, Associate Director, Center for Postsecondary Research "Indiana University" (3/22/2017 12:00:00 AM)"For nearly a decade, higher education has been abuzz with the educational power of 'high impact practices' - a family of interactive, hands-on pedagogies through which students and faculty work together on complex, important questions. Teaching the Whole Student reaches through the hype to explore, in rich, evidence-supported detail, how these engaged pedagogies kindle students' own sense of purpose and build commitment to help create a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future."--Carol Geary Schneider, Fellow, Lumina Foundation and President Emerita "Association of American Colleges and Universities" (3/24/2017 12:00:00 AM)"In an era where administrative strategies to increase student retention tend to miss the mark, this elegant anthology of thoughtful essays by experienced college and university faculty helps bring attention back to the essentials of genuine, effective teaching and learning."--John R. Thelin, Professor "University of Kentucky" (3/3/2017 12:00:00 AM)"Ultimately the strength of this book can be found in the questions that it poses more than in the answers it suggests. Each essay concludes with a set of reflection questions prompted by the content of the essay, and a patient, thoughtful reader could work her way through this book and be richly rewarded."--Reflective Teaching (12/18/2017 12:00:00 AM)Exploring and justifying our attention as educators to the multiple connections of the pedagogies of engaged learning to the valuing of the wholeness of our students' lives and experiences provides the compelling c