For what it’s worth, where learning happens is as important as how it happens. For a young learner to receive the best possible learning experience, it is essential that every aspect of the learning process is taken into consideration.
As stakeholders of learning, teachers, parents, and the communities supporting young learners all play a vital role in shaping their future and nurturing them to become healthy, challenged, engaged, supported, and safe. Programs designed to empower and enable learning professionals, everyone from teachers and administrators to school staff, are integral to the well-being of every young learner, and any effort at improving the support they provide to learners benefits the whole school as a community.
Holistic education pertains to the total development of a learner’s intellectual, social, physical, emotional, artistic, and creative capacities, shaping them into responsible individuals, whole persons who understand their role in helping build the nation forward and face the challenges of an ever-changing world.
As a philosophy, holistic learning involves helping a young learner find meaning and purpose in life through connections, from the classroom to the community, with nature, and with society at large. With guiding values like compassion and peace, holistic education brings forward a shared passion for learning that aims to uplift everyone and help transform the experience of education into something that one can cherish for a lifetime. This is done by implementing fresh strategies that help emphasize hands-on experiences, letting young learners learn by doing and challenging their capacity for critical thinking and developing their problem-solving skills.
Setups that enhance learning from group work and encourage social interaction to collaborate on solutions are intentionally designed. With this approach, both understanding and action are prioritized over rote knowledge, hence facilitating and emphasizing cooperation rather than mere competition. This also means that throughout the learning process, the assessment and evaluation of a young learner’s progress are dynamic, and every aspect of the curriculum is designed to help create lifelong learners.
With the campaign for progressive education through the Whole Child initiative, holistic child development has become one of the primary goals of schools. With this kind of learning philosophy, young learners are provided with personalized support, safe and secure environments, sound health, and learning opportunities tailored to their unique, individual skills and talents. Through this approach, both the traditional academic aspects of learning and the non-traditional side are nurtured, enhanced, and supported. This means that not only learning professionals are involved in creating a holistic learning environment, everyone is parents, industries, and local communities. All play an important role in ensuring that every child grows up to become a Whole Child, supported, equipped, and ready to face the challenges of the 21st century.
The effort to create a holistic learning environment is marked by several features. This transition is characterized by a predisposition towards academic achievement at the fore to a more dynamic perspective of learning as something that prioritizes and nurtures a person’s character for long-term development and success. By connecting and communicating with education professionals and linking them with families, community members, and policy-making bodies, supporters of this effort for the Whole Child such as REX Book Store aim to help every person involved see the true value of holistic education. With enough effort, young learners will feel supported by the school and by everyone in the learning community, giving way to their personal development and growth. This means that if we are to continue nurturing Filipino learners today, it is also important to provide professional development services to help schools, teachers, parents, and administrators address today’s challenges in education and enable them to transform and achieve more in a shifting horizon of education.
Enabling every educator to be able to create and innovate solutions that will help nurture every Filipino learner and bring our nation’s education forward. By hosting conferences and symposiums to help educators learn about new tools, techniques, and learning pedagogies they can use to provide holistic education to learners at every level, REX helps support the continuous professional development of the Filipino educator. With exclusive seminars and workshops designed from results-oriented and research-based learning programs, REX helps educators learn more about specialized topics that are relevant to their professional practice.
At REX, we hope to transform these humble efforts by helping Filipino educators into a realization of the Whole Child initiative as a sustainable and productive campaign that will help build a globally competitive nation from the seeds of a fruitful collaboration between all stakeholders of education.
Read here to learn more about how we help engage and enable learning professionals in supporting students: http://www.rexpublishing.com.ph/whole-child-initiative/supported/
