WHOLE-PERSON LEARNING

Whole-person pedagogy manifests differently in different courses. One of the ways I embody this philosophy in the composition classroom is by focusing on student voice. In “Writing 101: Nature Writing,” I start by asking students to write a personal essay in an informal voice about an encounter with wilderness. This allows them to test their pens on a form of writing close to human speech. Their next two major assignments are more technical—literary analysis and science writing—but I encourage students to build upward from the “speaking voice” used in their personal essays. 

To further this discussion of the human voice in writing I introduce an AI-based minor assignment, in which I have class members prompt ChatGPT to write their essays for them. As a class we assess what the tool has produced. When I queried the class, every student agreed: while the AI could generate information with astonishing efficiency, and could certainly craft a grammatically competent paragraph, it could not effectively mimic a particular student’s voice, or give that sense of a person behind the writing. In an increasingly AI-saturated environment, authentic, human-sounding writing—the kind where you feel that warm intelligence of a thinking, feeling human behind the writing—is a skill of the future. I teach writing to equip young people to speak their whole selves into their assignments, jobs, and relationships. 

When I am teaching early modern or medieval literature there is a different set of concerns to address, but the whole-person pedagogical approach is no less crucial. Even for the student earnestly bringing their full self to the text the material can seem dense and other. When a modern student first encounters Julian of Norwich’s 

Showings or Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, they need de-pressurized space to digest and discuss. For that reason, I adopt a pedagogy of contemplative learning, which nurtures awareness and deep reflection as a creative response to cultures of anxiety or excessive competition. It allows students to consider not only what a text says, but what it says to them. 

This emphasis on contemplative learning doesn’t imply a neglect of modern tools: it means we use them as tools to abet deeper structures of human learning. When we read Dante, my students learn to navigate the 700-year history of commentaries using the Dartmouth Dante Project, and word-search his minor works in the Princeton database to find parallels with their readings of the Comedy. If we are engaging in late medieval visual culture, I train students to navigate the appropriate museum and library databases at the outset. But I seek to balance these modern technologies of learning against deeper human needs. My hope is that students in my classes will develop two complementary skills: 1) expert engagement with the best scholarly tools, digital or otherwise; balanced with 2) intentional disengagement for the purpose of slower and deeper learning.