Educating from the Heart

This book offers both theoretical overviews and practical approaches for educators, academics, education students and parents who are interested in transforming schools. It encourages reinvigorating approaches to learning and teaching that can easily be integrated into both public and private K-12 school classrooms, with many ideas also applicable to higher education. It supports an educational system based on the beliefs that heart and spirit are intertwined with mind and intellect, and that inner peace, wisdom, compassion, and conscience can be developed together with academic content and skills.

Educating from the Heart: Theoretical and Practical Approaches to Transforming Education is based on the questions: 'What does it mean to educate from the heart? What does it mean to educate with spirit?' It offers both theoretical overviews and practical approaches for educators, academics, education students and parents who are interested in transforming schools. Well-respected voices in the field of education provide a framework that includes recent findings from the world of neuroscience, as well as fresh perspectives about traditional wisdom. Practicing educators describe methods directly applicable in classrooms. In addition, many chapters emphasize the importance of educators attending to their own inner lives. The book encourages reinvigorating approaches to learning and teaching that can easily be integrated into both public and private K-12 school classrooms, with many ideas also applicable to higher education. It supports an educational system based on the beliefs that heart and spirit are intertwined with mind and intellect, and that inner peace, wisdom, compassion, and conscience can be developed together with academic content and skills.

Chapter 1 Foreword: The Spirit Dimension of Education
Chapter 2 Preface
Chapter 3 Acknowledgments
Chapter 4 Introduction
Part 5 Section I—Overview
Chapter 6 Developing Spirit Related Capacities of Children and Adolescents
Chapter 7 Supporting Inner Wisdom in Public Schools
Chapter 8 Developing Mindfulness and Emotional Self Regulation in American Education
Chapter 9 Nurturing the Spirit through Literature
Chapter 10 The Six Passages of Childhood—A Model for School-based Rites of Passage
Chapter 11 Paying Attention to the Whole Self
Part 12 Section II—Practice
Chapter 13 Deepening Presence and Interconnection in the Classroom
Chapter 14 The Yogi in the Classroom
Chapter 15 Simple in Means
Chapter 16 The Inner Life of Teaching
Chapter 17 Integrating the Spirit with Total Body Fitness
Chapter 18 Stress Reduction in a Middle Level Social Studies Class
Chapter 19 Teaching Children EmpathyJessica Toulis
Chapter 20 Counseling from the HeartMadelyn Nash
Chapter 21 Nurturing Childrenís Inner Resources—An Elementary School GuideAuriel Gray
Chapter 22 ConclusionAostre N. Johnson and Marilyn Webb Neagley
Chapter 23 Biographical Sketches