The aim of this study is to find a way of integrating curriculum from the viewpoints of holistic education, which is now considered as an alternative approach to modernistic education. The methodology of this study is basically theoretical approaches ...
The aim of this study is to find a way of integrating curriculum from the viewpoints of holistic education, which is now considered as an alternative approach to modernistic education. The methodology of this study is basically theoretical approaches with the analysis and synthesis of ideas from the existing literatures and the preceding experiments, and the major thoughts are heavily relied on John Miller's holistic approach to education.
This study began with the criticisms of modernistic education as a background of the necessity of alternative method by way of the holistic education, and then, investigation of the revolutionary changes in contemporary science, psychology, and understanding of human nature and existence.
Conventional education geared to modernism and an industrial-age culture is now in decline. Especially during the 20 century the culture had a pervasive influence on the ways of education by the economic, social, and political trends of almost all modern nations. It is the very problematic worldview based on several fundamental assumptions about our world and human nature that should be overcome:
1. It is essentially a materialistic world view; in most aspects of our lives, success, achievement, and value are measured by objective, tangible, quantitative standards, in other words, wealth and possessions, net profit, advanced degrees, public opinion polls, Gross National Product, and so forth.
2. It relies on rational, analytical, scientific ways of knowing in order to transform natural resources into 'wealth.' It honors professional expertise and impersonal technology above artistic or spiritual inspiration, and sees the earth and all its life as a resource to be exploited. This is a decidedly reductive attitude.
3. It assumes that human beings are primarily economic beings, motivated by the desire for comfort, luxury and status. It sees the society as a competitive marketplaces in which there are inevitably winners and losers.
4. It assumes that the divisions between groups of people, based on religion, language, occupation, gender, race, and nationality, are more real and enduring than our common humanity.
Holistic education can be considered as an alternative approach to solve these problems of modernistic education, and at the same time seeks to restore the wholeness of human being with an emphasis on spirituality and meaning. Therefore, curriculum integration from the viewpoint of holistic education is different from the ordinary mechanical way of integration in that the former has a definite sense of direction and value orientations rooted in the reconceptualization of the wholeness of human nature and the world, physical and spiritual. In addition, this study inquired into the changing conceptions of intelligence, thinking, and learning as important foundations of holistic education. Finally the way of integrating and developing the contents as well as teaching-learning model of holistic education was explored in several ways.
Although the utilization of authenticities of all approaches in proper places is one of the strong point of holistic education, education can be characterized as holistic when demonstrating the following four major orientations:
1. Holistic education nurtures the development of the whole person, it is concerned with intellectual as well as emotional, social, physical, creative/intuitive, aesthetic, and spiritual potentials.
2. Holistic education revolves around relationships between learners, between young people and adults. The relationship between the teacher and the student tends to be egalitarian, open, dynamic in holistic settings, rather than bound by bureaucratic roles or authoritarian rules. A sense of community is essential.
3. Holistic education is concerned with life experience, not with narrowly defined `basic skills.' Education is growth, discovery, and a widening of horizons; it is an engagement with the world, a quest for understanding and meaning. This quest goes for beyond the limited horizons of conventional curricula, textbooks, and standardized exams.
4. Holistic education enables learners to critically approach the cultural, moral, and political contexts of their lives. It recognizes that cultures are created by people and can be changed by people if they fail to serve important human needs. In contrast, conventional education aims only to replicate the established culture in the nest generation. Holistic education, then, is a radical endeavor.
In a broad sense, the terms of 'holistic' sometimes can be used as synonyms with ecological, integrated, contextual, spiritual, environmental, systematic, organic, and evolutionary. Therefore, the conception of holistic includes the one of all words above.
The holistic approach has been recognized alternative one for the 21st world view. Especially, this understanding of emerging curriculum field is of more special interest to us than effective teaching and learning into meta-education.
From the viewpoint of holistic education, we need to incorporate the frame. of environmental education into the perspectives in the following: 1) to emphasize a respect for life and relationships among living things; 2) To emphasize earth ecology education and earth community education; 3) To introduce spiritual education and transpersonal psychological education partly; 4) To emphasize the education which integrate body, emotions, consciousness, the spirit; 5) To emphasize an environment in which teachers and students would be real or genuine in their communication and meeting.
The environmental education has multi-level and multi-dimensional proper-ties. Therefore, it needs to be an interdisciplinary approach. Following this viewpoint, this research is carried out through integrating the Gurjieff's Enneagram, the Gardner's multiple intelligences, and the Story model into a holistic model. This study has focused on learners' internalization of environmental education, which is the key of pedagogy. Also, a 6-step model in the integrated curriculum is proposed for the environmental education: motive induction, process for facts insight, recognition process, the multilateral thinking process, Assagioli's identification/disidentification for will education, and confirmation of degree of accomplishment.
A 6-step model emphasized a perspective of holistic environmental education so that it fully presented holistic environmental teaching and learning mode which encompassed left-brain learning mode, right-brain learning mode, physical-sensory learning mode, and affective learning mode, to be holistically used for learners. It is also expected that the 6-step model will be effectively implemented for learners to enhance their inquiry, creativity, environmental process mind, attitudes toward mankind and universe, and to holistically develop learner's variety abilities.
However, Since holistic curriculum has been criticized for being too idealistic, subjective and theoretical, many concrete researches need to be done for educational practice. For that purpose, holistic curriculum should be enriched and elaborated by the inclusion of new ideas from a variety of disciplines such as existing humanistic theories and methods.