Creating the Joyful Writer: Introducing the Holistic Approach in the Classroom
By Susan A. Schiller, Ph.D., English
Central Michigan University

I wrote Creating the Joyful Writer: Introducing the Holistic Approach in the Classroom to provide mainstream teachers with an accessible introduction to holistic education as well as to provide an affordable book that explains theory and offers practical writing activities. Teachers using this book in a classroom setting need to be familiar with holistic principles.  Creating the Joyful Writer presents a broad overview of holistic education, including historical background (dating from Rousseau), creativity theory, classroom tested activities, a list of holistic schools, and an annotated bibliography for extended reading.  It offers the basics for anyone who wants to use a holistic approach.

To briefly summarize, holistic education addresses the whole person within a social and environmental context and perceives all elements of a person--intellectual, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual--as avenues for growth and learning. It also moves beyond mainstream conventional approaches that primarily value and rely on logical ways of knowing and on ways that condition people to become competitors and consumers. Instead, it aims to establish contexts in which learners become independent and self-motivated people who experience awe and reverence in and for life. Its nonsectarian spiritual center asks that teachers thus engaged have a personal commitment to their own spiritual and self-development.

My own self-development, as a scholar in Composition Studies and as a human being, has led me to embrace a holistic approach to writing because it is most effective in engaging the whole learner.  I have come to believe that mainstream approaches to writing instruction should shift so that writing instruction is connected to something in the writer’s world and becomes both desirable and worthwhile to that person.  I see writing as a natural site for holism because writing is a way of knowing that connects and draws from our inner and outer worlds. When we use holistic approaches to teach writing, we can bring joy back into the classroom and help students change negative attitudes they may have developed during conventional approaches.

The holistic activities in Creating the Joyful Writer establish a venue in which writers learn to value and use intuition and emotion as informative respectful avenues of discovery. Most of these writing activities are flexible and can be altered to suit varying ages or skill levels; they can be teacher directed or self-directed.  Step-by-step instructions, prerequisites, safety precautions, materials needed, time desired, and learning goals are also suggested.  Some activities invite solo writing, while others require collaboration with a partner or in small groups. All of them ask writers to blend the intellect, emotional, physical, visual and other ways of knowing. In each activity, exigence and creativity guide rhetorical choices from word choice, to voice, to goal, to final draft, while self-satisfaction and effectiveness in responding to exigence directs evaluation.  When holism is habitually initiated, writers learn to use the spiritual center of their creativity to engage writing, and it is this center that creates a joyful writer.