Supporting Holistic Student Development through Online Community Building

Abstract

   Holistic learning is an extensive approach to teaching, where teachers seek to manage emotional, social, ethical, and academic needs of students in a coherent learning format. Importance is placed on a positive atmosphere in schools and providing academic and nonacademic support to students. Students are taught to contemplate their actions and how they impact their community- globally and locally, and how to learn from the community around them. Holistic education encompasses a wide range of philosophical orientations and pedagogical practices. Its focus is on wholeness, and it attempts to avoid excluding any significant aspects of the human experience. It is an eclectic and inclusive movement whose main characteristic is the idea that educational experiences foster a less materialistic and a more spiritual worldview along with more dynamic and holistic views of reality It also proposes that educational experience promote a more balanced development of and cultivate the relationship among the different aspects of the individual (intellectual, physical, spiritual, emotional, social and Aesthetic), as well as the relationships between the individual and other people, the individual and natural environment, the inner- self of students and external. Holistic education is concerned with life experience, not with narrowly defined'' basic skills".