Understanding the Whole Student

Understanding the Whole Student presents a holistic approach to multicultural educational issues by viewing them in terms of the student as a physical, psychosocial, cognitive, ethical, and spiritual being. Conversely, these levels of a student's being cannot be seen apart from the student's cultural identities. This unique book demonstrates that, in a pluralistic democracy, good teaching and deep learning must be multicultural and must look at the student as a whole being, not just as a future worker in a transnational corporate economy as is currently the case with both neo-liberal and neo-conservative programs for 'reform.' The authors contend that good education is, and must be, multicultural in order to gain a deeper perspective on issues under analysis in the classroom through the sharing and negotiating of many different cultural perspectives.

This may be the most important book on teaching and learning to have emerged in years. The authors have masterfully crafted an in-depth analysis of holistic education, while humanizing the multicultural experience as a pedagogical imperative. The text is well organized, clearly written, and meticulously researched. Faculty and students in teacher preparation programs, in graduate education programs, and those parents, administrators, and teachers working with children in today's classrooms will find this book timely, insightful, highly engaging, and critically essential. I applaud the authors for this most significant contribution to the field of education., In Understanding the Whole Student, Mayes and his associates emphasize how we are all culturally embedded beings. Taking a holistic perspective of cultural embeddedness (asserting that multicultural education isn't all about power relations), the book provocatively lays the groundwork for asking some questions that multicultural education may too often ignore: How does culture interact with the sensori-motor, psycho-social, cognitive, and ethico-spiritual dimensions of human nature? And what does it mean for education to be both holistic and multicultural? In a world where cultures are violently colliding, these are fundamental questions.

Clifford Mayes is a professor of educational psychology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He grew up between the Latino barrios and the Papago Indian Reservation in Arizona in the 1960s and has taught in Asia and Central America.