Meeting the Whole Person in the Community College Classroom

Abstract

The “whole person,” or modern student, can be met in the community college classroom through understanding what constitutes the whole person, what classroom environment best supports the whole person, and what activities address each part of the whole person. Whole person learning addresses the student’s body, mind, heart, and spirit which can be defined as the physical form, intellect, community, and purpose composing the student. The practical classroom environment treats the content of the course as both object of knowledge and subject with relationships, understanding that the teacher can move among being an expert, a facilitator, or fellow learner. Finally, three modes of instruction – teaching, teaching and learning, and learning – can be used to maximize learning for the whole person.

Meeting the Whole Person in the Community College Classroom

Whole person learning is a catchphrase used throughout higher education when referring to the best possible method of a student’s gaining knowledge, as the ultimate goal of education. Educating the whole person has been a goal of education since the early writings of John Dewey on progressive education. The humanistic psychology movement, conceived by Abraham Maslow in the early 1960s as a third school of psychology besides behaviorism and psychoanalysis, placed an emphasis on understanding the person as a whole (Buhler, 1971). Simultaneously, Carl Rogers (1989) took this humanistic notion into his work to develop the client-centered approach to therapy. From this, the notion of the whole person and whole person learning advanced and then was applied to education.

A variety of definitions of a whole person exists in the literature from humanistic psychology (see Maslow, 1999), to philosophy (see Buber, 1967), to therapy (see Rogers, 1989) to education (see Palmer, 1998), and to management (see Covey, 2006). Each definition serves to assist that particular discipline, but the lack of clarity and common vocabulary across disciplines is missing. Hence, the advantages of this approach to education potentially can be obscured (Hare, 2006). Indeed, a lack of cohesiveness in defining the critical components of this humanistic approach of whole person learning has hampered its development (Huitt, 2001).  Yet, the approach warrants considerable attention because the basic purpose is to provide a foundation for personal growth and development so that learning continues throughout the person’s life in a self-directed manner, true life-long learning (DeCarvalho as cited in Huitt, 2001).

This paper attempts to define whole person learning for use in the community college classroom in order to provide a more enriching learning experience for the students. To do this, a variety of writers from the humanistic tradition are reviewed to create a synthesis of what constitutes a whole person in an educational setting. Next, a review of a typical, ideal, and practical college classroom environment will be described. Finally, a model will be proposed to synthesize the practical environment of the college classroom, the student as a whole person, and classroom activities designed for both.

Defining the Whole Person

Table 1 provides an overview of writers that have defined the whole person in the context of education or training. The table displays a variety of viewpoints historically and across disciplines (e.g. education, philosophy, theology, and business) and is not necessarily intended to be comprehensive.

Writer	Whole Person
John Dewey (1938)	Subject, object, experience
Martin Buber (1967)	I, Thou [You], It
J.F.T. Bugental (1965)	I, Me, Self, Person
Abraham Maslow (1998)	Essence and self
Charlotte Buhler (1971)	Cognition, conation, and affect
Carl Rogers (1989)	Cognition, feeling, experience
Peter Vaill (1996)	Being
Parker Palmer (1998)	Intellectual, emotional, spiritual
Stephen Covey (2006)	Body, mind, heart, spirit

At first glance, some of the writers appear to define whole person with obvious or subtle omissions. Palmer (1998) seems to have overlooked the corporeal form in his definition as does Buhler (1971). However, further investigation of their definitions determine that Palmer assumes the locus of the whole person resides in the physical form and, therefore, is encompassed in the term intelligence, emotion, and spirit. Similarly for Buhler (1971), cognition cannot occur without the physical presence of a brain; the body is the vehicle for conation; and affect is intrinsically linked with the physical senses. Thus, though the body is not a separate conception of the whole person, it is necessarily a part of all of Buhler’s definitions.

Covey’s (2006) terms for the whole person – mind, body, heart, and spirit – provide the basis for the synthesized definition, as these are familiar terms without being mired in terminology peculiar to specific disciplines. Further, most educators are familiar with the popular culture concepts of the mind, body, and spirit of the student. Covey’s use of heart to define the person in a social context adds an important dimension such that a person exists in relation to and in conjunction with other persons. This property of the whole person is assumed by many of the writers listed in Table 1. However, Covey includes the social context explicitly, which is consistent with Dewey’s (1938) assertion that education comes about through interaction, necessarily a social process of community.

Body

Body refers to the physical abilities and limitations of the corporeal form of the person. This includes the external senses experienced by the person – smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing. With this, then, experience from physical encounters must be included, since any event in the person’s past was experienced in physical form. The body refers to all elements in which the person experiences himself or herself as an object (Dewey, 1938) or an It (Buber, 1967) in the world. Experience is first taken in or grasped through the body as a felt encounter and thus becomes phenomenological (Yorks & Kasl, 2002). Maslow (1968) used the term essence to describe the biological nature of a person as a member of a species, that which makes humans a part of animal nature.

Mind

Mind refers to the person’s self in the classic sense of humanistic psychology, encompassing cognition, intellect, emotion, identity, affect, perception, conation, and experience. Buber (1967) and Bugental (1965) describe this as the “I” in the person – his or her awareness of being a human with all associated drives, needs, desires, and experiences. Within the mind, experience becomes pragmatic, an interaction with the world that takes on meaning when made the object of reflection rather than the interaction, itself (Yorks & Kasl, 2002). Dewey (1938) used the term subject to imply the awareness of the person as having a self that is more than just a body, one that has experiences and interacts with the world. For Maslow (1968), the self is the awareness of the person’s need to become fully human which can only be achieved through understanding the intrinsic paradox of both the nomothetic (sameness) and ideographic (uniqueness) nature of a person, resulting in self-actualization. Thus, mind also includes the conative aspect of the person – desire, purpose, will and volition.

Heart

Heart describes the person in a social context full of relationships, love, and belonging (Covey, 2006). Each person is entangled in a web of interactions with other persons from the stranger on the sidewalk with whom one avoids colliding to the intimate partner, and the vast continuum between the two. As Dewey’s (1938) central concept of an educational process was experience, “the principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process” (p. 65). Through interaction with others, a person discovers his or her own identity by uncovering the masks or facades one uses to project what one ought to be to others (Rogers, 1989).  Heart is an essential ingredient in the mix of the person in drawing forth the person’s potential through dialogue (Buber, 1967). Indeed, the importance of the social context is not lost on Buber as he describes the lasting interaction of two persons:

[Man] can enter into relationship with this independently existing other… This other existent being… still extends unmeasurably [sic] beyond the meeting – and nonetheless it stands in an undiminished partnership with the human person.

(Buber, 1967, p. 120)

Spirit

Finally, spirit is that part of a person in which he or she finds a purpose or meaning to his or her life. Grounded in spirit are the values and beliefs of the individual as well as the cultural norms of the person’s social environment. This purpose or meaning could be found through religion for some. Others may seek spirituality or meaning through a willingness to enter into a process of dialogue within oneself or with others (Vaill, 1996). Regardless, the spirit is the search for truth, whatever that truth may be for a person, and “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline” (Palmer, 1998, p. 104). The spirit within a person is that which drives the other parts – mind, body, and heart – to search for truth and meaning.

A model for the whole person is represented in Figure 1, encompassing the mind, body, and heart surrounding the spirit, the underlying purpose for which the mind, body, and heart are used in the search for meaning and contribution (Covey, 2006).

However, a basic postulate of humanistic psychology is that a person cannot be recognized as simply an additive product of various parts, as the definition advanced so far might indicate. Defining various parts of a whole person is valuable in creating a conception, but the person necessarily must be recognized as a human that transcends the product of his or her functioning parts (Bugental, 1965). Relationships exist between and among these parts, so there is process as well as structure, all engaging one another (Sleeth, 2006).

The College Classroom

In meeting the whole person in the classroom, the typical community college classroom follows the expert model. Palmer (1998) describes this as the objectivist myth of knowing whereby the content of the course is treated as a sacred object that can only be conveyed to students by an expert. The objects of knowledge are pristine facts from a given discipline. The experts are the teachers who have been trained in methods for relaying the objects of knowledge. The students are merely amateurs who are dependent upon the experts for the knowledge. Finally, baffles are in place between the object of knowledge, the expert, and the students which allow information to flow only in one direction (See Figure 2).

Palmer (1998) further argues that this method has “profoundly deformed the way we educate” (p. 101).  As a result, the predominant method of delivery is the lecture. The constraints for continuing this education model include such things as standardized curriculums, assessment methodologies for accreditation, departmental course objectives, uniform textbooks, and sometimes disdain for individual variation by administrators. Two goals often encouraged in schools – encouraging teacher initiative and creativity, and implementing a consistent curriculum – are fundamentally at odds, as argued by Michael Knapp, a professor in the University of Washington’s College of Education (Thompson, 2008).

Ramsey and Fitzgibbons (2005) would characterize this educational method as doing things to students, which places the emphasis on teaching as a means of passing on knowledge in the form of lectures, PowerPoint presentations, textbooks, and readings.

Palmer (1998) recommends creating a community of truth in which there are no untouchable objects of knowledge and no experts. In a community of truth, all participants are simply knowers who share information around a given subject or discipline. Thus, the subject is available for a relationship and all participants share in the knowing, teaching, and learning (see Figure 3).

This model of education is similar to Carl Roger’s  (1989) student-centered learning approach in which the student determines what to learn, when to learn, and how to learn. Only in this instance, the students are knowers and learn in a community providing for active involvement with experiential learning.

This model works well for many organizations – business teams, church groups, reading circles – but has limitations with higher education when demands are placed upon faculty for administrative details, departmental course objectives, accreditation requirements, and textbook selection, to name a few.

Ramsey and Fitzgibbons (2005) provide a synthesis with their idea of being in the classroom. Similar to Vaill’s (1996) approach to learning as a way of being, simply meaning that learning and living go hand-in-hand, these researchers describe a hybrid method of being in the classroom: doing something to students, doing something with students, and being with students. For them, these correspond to teaching, teaching and learning, and learning, respectively. Table 2 describes some of these differences and approaches in the classroom.

Teaching (doing to)	Teaching and Learning (doing with)	Learning (being with)
Nature of learning Teacher responsible for learning outcomes Teacher and book as sources of learning Planned, specific learning outcomes Theory	Teacher responsible for learning outcomes Experiences and self-assessment Emergent learning outcomes Theory and practice/skill development	Mutual responsibility for learning outcomes Everything/everyone as sources of learning Flexible learning outcomes Self-discovery
Role of teacher Transfer of information Lecture Telling Prepares syllabus, handouts Testing knowledge	Creation and manipulation of experience Discussion, activities Demonstrating Facilitator Testing application/skill competency	Facilitation of opportunities for learning Using what’s in the room Modeling, listening Servant leader Authenticity Creating learning opportunities, allowing community to develop Individualized and mutually negotiated assessment
Role of student Dependent What do you want me to know? Compliance	Interdependent What do you want me to think/feel/practice? Cooperation	Interbeing Who am I and how do the concepts relate to me? Commitment
Nature of classroom interactions Teacher-initiated Distant, separate Starting and ending with teacher	Student-initiated, teacher controlled Present and engaged Starting with the teacher and ending where teacher and student both are	Mutually initiated Fully present, intense, intimate, respectful Starting where students are; allowing them to move where they feel they need to be

All of these forms of teaching and learning are valid and complimentary. By using a variety of these methods within the classroom, faculty are able to meet the needs and demands of the administration and departments while also enjoying initiative and creativity.

A Practical Model of the College Classroom

A more realistic model for the practical college classroom, then, is a hybrid of Palmer’s objectivist myth of knowing and the community of truth with Ramsey and Fitzgibbon’s addition of the role of the teacher (see Figure 4).

At times, the content is an object of knowledge that exists in a pristine form described by facts in a given discipline (teaching mode). At other times, the content is a subject owned by all participants in a relationship (learning mode). Finally, the content can be both object and subject in the classroom (teaching and learning mode). This model accurately represents the faculty member as needing to be an expert at times, a facilitator, and a fellow knower or student within the classroom to best present the content of the course.

The Whole Person in the Classroom

The whole person who now comes to this classroom is a knower in a community of truth (Palmer, 1998) bringing with them their whole selves – body, mind, heart, and spirit (Covey, 2006) – who can expect to have specific teaching, learning, and experiences meeting the needs of the whole person (Ramsey & Fitzgibbons, 2005) in their classroom experience (see Figure 5).

Finally, the complete model provides a synthesis of the ideal practical classroom incorporating all of the previous elements from the literature on whole person learning, the role of the teacher, and the different modes of teaching (see Figure 6).

Although whole person learning has often been a trite catchphrase in higher education to describe the best possible method for a student’s gaining knowledge, much of the literature supports this notion. However, with additional interpretations, what constitutes the whole person can now be defined appropriately, along with modes of teaching and methods of instruction towards that goal. Thus, the whole person can be met in the classroom to optimize the experiences of both the student and the teacher in a manner that maximizes learning for the body, mind, heart, and spirit.

References

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Bugental, J.F.T. (1965). The search for authenticity. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Buhler, C. (1969). Humanistic psychology as an educational program. American Psychologist, 24(8), 736-742.

Buhler, C. (1971). Basic theoretical concepts of humanistic psychology. American Psychologist, 26, 378-386.

Covey, S.R. (2006, Summer). Leading in the knowledge worker age. Leader to Leader, 2006(41), 11-15.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: MacMillan.

Hare, J. (2006). Towards an understanding of holistic education in the middles years of education. Journal of Research in International Education, 5(3), 301-322.

Maslow, A.H. (1968, Fall). Some educational implications of the humanistic psychologies. Harvard Educational Review, 38(4), 685-696.

Maslow, A.H. (1999). Toward a psychology of being (3rd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Palmer, P.J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Rogers, C.R. (1989). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Sleeth, D.B. (2006). The self and the integral interface: Toward a new understanding of the whole person. The Humanistic Psychologist, 34(3), 243-261.

Thompson, L. (2008, September 14). A push for perfection helped stoke revolt by teachers. The Seattle Times, pp. A1, A9.

Vaill, P.B. (1996). Learning as a way of being: Strategies for survival in a world of permanent white water. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Yorks, L., & Kasl, E. (2002, May). Toward a theory and practice for whole-person learning: Reconceptualizing experience and the role of affect. Adult Education Quarterly, 52(3), 176-192.