88 Chapter 2 This chapter investigates a concrete proposal for a holistic approach applied to education. This approach emerged since 2005, first in the United States, but soon as a worldwide movement that can be captured under the title of WCD. This movement can be considered the reaction that was to be expected— and was actually predicted by the American scholar John I. Goodlad (1979), as argued in Chapter 1.2.2—from educational practitioners all around the globe but especially in the West. Their joint experience was that it made no sense that, in a time of rapid cultural change, schools were assigned a series of new tasks without a fundamental re-evaluation of their functionality in the new sociocultural reality of high diversity and high complexity. This chapter’s central aim is to describe the WCD movement historically—which not has been done before (1)—and to understand its historical situatedness and holistic nature. This must be accomplished to be able to draw lessons concerning the central research question: How can a holistic approach to education reinforce Christian citizenship formation in the context of a modern, fragmented society? I will first elaborate briefly on the problem of reductionism in education, which was mentioned in the previous chapter in relation to fragmentation (Section 1). In the three sections that follow, I will take some necessary steps towards understanding WCD as a response to the challenges of both reductionism and fragmentation. The first step is a historical description of holism as it emerged in the 20th century (Section 2); the second is a description of whole child education (WCE) as a wholistic approach (Section 3); and the third step shows how holism and WCE over time merged into WCD (Section 4). These lines of reasoning come together in Section 5, which presents a conceptual framework for WCD, as prepared by the overarching research consortium into WCD that operated in the Netherlands from 2020–2024 (Section 5). The chapter will end with a brief conclusion that paves the way for what I want to do next (in Chapter 3)—namely, to evaluate WCD from the perspective of Christian anthropology. 1 This chapter was initially written in association with the overarching WCD research consortium consisting of Hogeschool Leiden, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Hogeschool Windesheim and DCU. It was published in Dutch on the website of the project leader, NIVOZ Foundation (van Olst, 2021).
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