Educating the 'Whole Child"

To the doctor, the child is a typhoid patient; to the playground supervisor, a first baseman; to the teacher, a learner of arithmetic. At times, he may be different things to each of these specialists, but too rarely is he a whole child to any of them.
—From the 1930 report of the White House Conference on Children and Youth


My older brother was diagnosed as legally blind when he was just a toddler. Since then he has had to learn how to deal with not seeing the world or experiencing it as I do. From the very basic of things like brushing his teeth, going to the bathroom, or writing he could not do without some sort of aid. When we were in elementary school he always had problems. Other students would make fun of him because he wasn’t like them and this made him angry. The teachers would try to accommodate him, but after a while they gave up. It was not until he went away to the W. Ross Macdonald School in Brantford that he began to excel. Today he lives with his girlfriend in London, living life to the fullest.


Teaching to the ‘whole child’ is a concept centered on children with diversities. Kochhar-Bryant, a dean at the George Washington University, describes educating the ‘whole child’ as, “attending to cognitive, social, emotional, physical, and talent development of children and youth from widely diverse backgrounds”. This form of teaching works on focusing on students with differences and assessing them separately from each other. Rather than clumping a class as similar, teachers who educate the ‘whole child’ become attentive to the differences of each student.

When I asked Dr. Bilaniuk about what it means to teach to the ‘whole child’ she explained it as, “learning the differences of each student and helping them the best you can, so they succeed”. So far in her classroom, I can see her implementing this concept. At the end of February she had a few students in her grade 9 classes who didn’t speak English very well and she had a test coming up, so she took the time out of her day to accommodate these students and translate the test into their respective languages. Rather than giving the students the test in English with a dictionary, she went over and beyond the expected to help them succeed. In my mentorship class, she also goes beyond what is expected. The work Dr. Bilaniuk assigns is always interactive and challenges each student equally. It is a mix of answering questions, matching concepts to definitions, and thinking about what idea applies to what and then creating a poster for it. The posters are a favourite for many students, because it requires teamwork and collaboration. For many students, working by themselves is either boring or hard, which causes their focus to stray and they do something else. However, with posters the students work together to finish it.


In conclusion, to educate the ‘whole student/child’ means to accommodate the differences of each child. Whether it be the child who can’t afford school supplies, the child who can’t speak English, the child who comes from a broken home, the child who excels at certain subjects, the child who needs extra help to learn concepts or the child who has mental issues, each child should be treated as individuals when being taught.