Second International Research Handbook On Values Education And Student Wellbeing

This collection applies the principles underlying values education to addressing the many social and learning challenges that impinge on education today . Insights in the fields of social and emotional learning, student wellbeing, and, increasingly, educational neuroscience have demonstrated that values education represents an efficacious pedagogy with holistic effects on students across a range of measures, including social, emotional, and intellectual outcomes. With schools in the 21st century confronting issues such as gender identity, stemming radicalism, mental health, equity for disadvantaged groups, bullying, respect, and the meaning of consent, values education offers a way of teaching and learning that integrates and enhances student’s affective and cognitive functioning. The earlier edition of this book has become a standard reference for scholars and practitioners in the fields of values education, moral education, and character education. Its citation rates, reads and downloads have been consistently and enduringly high, as have those of its companion text, Values Pedagogy and Student Achievement. A decade on, the main purpose of the revised edition is to update and incorporate new research and practice relevant to values education. Recent insights in the fields of neuroscience and social and emotional learning and their implications for education and student wellbeing are more overt than they were when the first edition was being compiled. Additionally, advanced thinking in the field of epistemology, how humans come to know and therefore learn, has also sharpened, especially through the later writings of prominent scholars like Jurgen Habermas. The revised edition has preserved the essential spirit and thrust of the original edition while making space for some of these new insights about the potential of values education to establish optimal and harmonious learning and social environments for both students and teachers.

Informed by the most up-to-date research from around the world, as well as examples of good practice, this handbook analyzes values education in the context of a range of school-based measures associated with student wellbeing. These include social, emotional, moral and spiritual growth – elements that seem to be present where intellectual advancement and academic achievement are being maximized. This text comes as ‘values education’ widens in scope from being concerned with morality, ethics, civics and citizenship to a broader definition synonymous with a holistic approach to education in general. This expanded purview is frequently described as pedagogy relating to ‘values’ and ‘wellbeing’. This contemporary understanding of values education, or values and wellbeing pedagogy, fits well with recent neuroscience research. This has shown that notions of cognition, or intellect, are far more intertwined with social and emotional growth than earlier educational paradigms have allowed for. In other words, the best laid plans about the technical aspects of pedagogy are bound to fail unless the growth of the whole person – social, emotional, moral, spiritual and intellectual, is the pedagogical target. Teachers and educationalists will find that this handbook provides evidence, culled from both research and practice, of the beneficial effects of such a ‘values and wellbeing’ pedagogy.

Under the weight of a combination of forces, many of the older paradigms of learning are being questioned in our time. Among the updated research that elicits such critique is that which deals directly with effective pedagogy, clearly illustrating the enhanced effects on learning when it is dealt with as a holistic developmental enterprise rather than one concerned solely with content, technique and measurable outcomes. This research includes volumes of empirical evidence and conceptual analysis from across the globe that point to the inextricability of values as lying at the heart of those forms of good practice pedagogy that support and facilitate the species of student achievement that truly does transform the life chances of students. This research indicates that the combination of values rich learning environments and values discourse (that is, the holism of implicit and explicit pedagogy) has potential for positive influence on learning outcomes, most markedly for those deemed likely to fail without such pedagogical intervention. Values Pedagogy and Student Achievement - Contemporary Research Evidence uncovers, explores and appraises those volumes of evidence and analysis, illustrating their pertinence to student achievement, the vexed issue that lies at the heart of all for which education stands.

This book summarizes and updates findings from the Australian Values Education Program with a focus on the latest international research in the field, both theoretical and practice-based. Further, it provides a theoretical and practical basis for understanding the disenchantment with low-level accountability approaches to learning (e.g. NAPLAN in Australia). In turn, the book demonstrates the effectiveness of Values Education as a holistic pedagogy with the potential to enhance students’ learning effects in terms of their personal, social, emotional and academic development. It offers well-tested alternative pedagogical approaches, based on research insights largely originating from actual classroom-based practice.

Teachers are called nation builders in every country and in every society. The role of teachers is of great importance. It is left to the teachers to inculcate personality characteristics, right values – the values of good citizenship producing law abiding and nation loving citizens. India has made considerable progress in school education since independence with reference to overall literacy, infrastructure and universal access and enrolment in schools. Two major developments in the recent years form the background to the present reform in teacher education – the political recognition of Universalization of Elementary Education (UEE) as a legitimate demand and the state commitment towards UEE in the form of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. The country has to address the need of supplying well qualified and professionally trained teachers in larger numbers in the coming years. At the same time, the demand for quality secondary education is steadily increasing. It is recommended that the aim should be to reach universal secondary education within a maximum of ten years. Given the problems of inadequate quality in most secondary schools due to poor infrastructure and insufficient and poorly equipped teachers, the need for addressing the professional education of secondary teachers acquires great importance. The education of teachers should be such that teachers should set an example and provide for their pupils the ideal of the citizens who is conformist, conservative and cautions. As for their moral character, righteousness, wisdom, honesty are among the adjectives which might be ascribed to them. Teachers should assist the students in their physical, intellectual, religious, social, emotional, spiritual development in the well balanced and harmonious manner and imbue them with human values, which is why teacher education today is an integral part of any educational system. In this study, personality traits of teachers will be analyzed in conjunction with their teaching effectiveness, in order to reach a better understanding of what makes a good teacher, and how to educate him to satisfy the rising demand of the Indian society.

Based upon an empirical study involving training and practising teachers from seven countries, this book investigates the various attitudes and practices towards the teaching of values and their place in the curriculum. Countries covered include: Australia, Eire, Israel, Slovenia, Switzerland, UK and USA. The findings of each of the countries are compared and contrasted in the light of the diverse cultural conditions which are apparent. This book brings together various approaches currently taken in values education and also suggests a theoretical foundation for decision making. The book culminates in practical examples, drawn from the evidence of the research project, which teachers can adapt for use with their own pupils. This book provides a challenging and imaginative perspective on values in education and comes at a time when educators face a new era which demands dynamic, transformative and reflective approaches.