Educating the Whole Person: Are We Doing It and How Do We Know?

• In Event: 43.016 - Forming Lives of Meaning and Purpose: A 21st Century Mission for Schools of Education?

Abstract

Objectives
Suppose a school of education decided undergraduate education should involve not only a focus on cognitive and socio-emotional development, but also sustained attention to personal growth, aiming to cultivate mature self-reflection, compassion and altruism, ethical and moral development—with the goal of placing students on trajectories toward leading to lives of meaning and purpose? One can plausibly argue that this is the ultimate goal of a liberal education (Nussbaum, 1997), a goal especially germane for school of education graduates. The hope is that during their college careers students absorb and then put into practice this broader view of human flourishing when they, in turn, become educators with responsibility for the next generation of learners.

Theoretical Orientation
A school with such ambitions would surely be applauded—but also pressed for evidence that it was succeeding. Although various instruments can measure some dimensions of personal development, they suffer from technical and substantive limitations. More problematically, the richer construct of “leading a life of meaning and purpose” remains ill-defined. Our studies aim to distinguish between meaning and purpose and elucidate their relationship to each other, as well as the relationships of each to constructs such as character and well-being (George & Park, 2013).

Further complicating matters, college students are in a phase often conceptualized as “emerging adulthood”, a period of ongoing—and ever-shifting—development and exploration (Arnett, 2000). Consequently, there is a need to find indicators—which may also shift—that signal an individual is on a path likely leading to a life of meaning and purpose.

Methods
With this practical and methodological challenge in view, we report on two Lynch School initiatives. The first draws on data collected during a freshman course entitled, First-Year ERA: Experience, Reflection, and Action. During the year, students produce extended essays in response to challenging scenarios. The essays are evaluated according to a scoring rubric that targets key facets of critical thinking, allowing us to track development of students’ critical thinking over the year. This has been done for five successive cohorts. Further, for two cohorts, students near the end of their senior year were readministered a scenario which they had addressed as freshmen. Senior essays were scored according to the same rubric so that, for these two cohorts, it is possible to measure changes in critical thinking over the full undergraduate experience.

The second initiative entails a “hybrid” instrument comprising various analytic dimensions drawn from extant literature which measure critical thinking, moral agency, compassion and purpose in life. Having been administered to two successive freshman classes, we will administer this instrument to these students at the conclusion of their sophomore and senior years. Preliminary analyses of freshman data have been conducted.

Scholarly Significance
The presentation will begin with a brief overview of the First-Year ERA: Experience, Reflection, and Action course. (See Appendix.) We then review findings from the two initiatives described above and outline plans to engage other universities in comparable studies and describe how these collective efforts might support program improvement and student outcomes.

Authors

• Audrey A. Friedman, Boston College

• Henry I. Braun, Boston College