102 Chapter 2 ASCD’s interest, been employed in a variety of different compositions. Finally, it results in ‘Whole Child Development’, with a conceptual framework for an alternative approach to the student within the educational process. creative moral cognitive physical social emotional spiritual To provide a clear synthesis of the 13 included studies in a way metaethnography does for ethnographical studies: WCD stands for an approach to the student that is critical of a narrow focus on academic achievement and solely cognitive growth, which is viewed as reductionism concerning the student, and that recommends taking into account from the beginning and throughout the educational process the student’s physical, emotional, social, creative, moral and spiritual wellbeing as well. In this way, it stands for a more holistic approach to the student in his or her individual and contextual complexity, which can be seen as an intentional correction of the kind of reductionism in education that seems to focus itself on just the cognitive child. Thereby it is a correction of the influence of fragmentation, at the least in the realm of education, which was part of problem of fragmentation as described in the previous chapter. 2.4 MERGING OF HOLISM AND WHOLISM IN EDUCATION The focus on the whole child, which started as a response to the NCLB policies in the United States, did not appear in a vacuum. In the field of education, even before the introduction of holism by Smuts (1926), a clear movement
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