Whole Child Development: A Commitment and a Responsibility

August 10, 2020

Kate Schuenke-Lucien is the Director of ACE Haiti and a member of the Measuring What Matters Learning Partnership, which the Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC) chairs. Kate joined the GC-DWC’s Communications Associate, Anna Hart, for a conversation on how to communicate whole child development (WCD), with a specific look at Haiti based on ACE Haiti’s Strong Beginnings initiative. The following article is based on this interview.

Whole child development (WCD) approaches to education, family, and community programming in low-resource contexts can often be met with resistance due to common misconceptions over what WCD actually is and encompasses. The most salient of these misconceptions is that a WCD approach necessitates less focus on the development of academic skills, which is generally a priority for parents and donors alike. However, if you pause and begin to break it down, WCD becomes fairly intuitive and rational to stakeholders. It is about looking at a child and understanding the relationship between all of their needs and committing to recognizing the impact these needs have on one another. At a very basic level, WCD recognizes society’s commitment to children and their most basic needs: it is both a commitment and a responsibility. When broken down in this way, with details that a stakeholder can personally understand, most can get behind WCD; however, the task of communicating WCD remains a challenge and one that must be approached with great intentionality.

While articulating the role of WCD will vary across contexts, the Strong Beginnings team’s work in Haiti has illuminated a set of steps that may prove helpful to practitioners in explaining WCD and the relationship it has to academic growth and overall flourishing for vulnerable children.

1. Start with health 

2. Find the cultural frame

3. Let the work speak for itself

Start with Health

WCD touches on many things that parents living in poverty can intuitively understand: hunger, stress, and exhaustion, to name a few. If you can get parents to understand how these factors impact their child’s education, you are much closer to gaining their buy-in to and understanding of the other aspects of WCD. However, gaining this buy-in requires that you do not simply tell parents that an empty stomach contributes to poor academic outcomes; rather, you will find more success if you invite parents to imagine what this experience must feel like for a small child. Any person can relate to feelings of hunger and the amount of emotional bandwidth hunger takes up in one’s mind, diverting his or her focus from a task at hand. For a child, this is amplified as he or she only has so much emotional bandwidth to manage his or her feelings of hunger, making it nearly impossible to focus on learning in a classroom. Similarly, if a child is scared, fear will overwhelm his or her mind distracting him or her from whatever learning is happening in the background. Parents, especially those with experiences of hunger and fear, innately understand this relationship. By enabling them to understand and relate to the physical components of WCD, you open the door to expanding their understanding to include other components of the approach, perhaps those that are less tangible.

Find the Cultural Frame

While health and nutrition are often easier for parents to understand, social and emotional learning (SEL) skills can be difficult for parents to grasp and are frequently viewed as superfluous skills. The key here is to search for elements of SEL that already exist in a culture and draw attention to the overlap. For example, in Haitain culture there is the idea of “konbit,” which essentially means that if you have a really big job (e.g., harvesting), you’re going to need a bunch of people to help you accomplish the task at hand. At its core, Konbit aligns closely with collaboration, an SEL skill that appears in many SEL frameworks; however, you will be far more likely to have success explaining the value and role of “konbit” in the classroom to Haitain parents over “collaboration.”

Beyond looking for overlap in skills, you can also look for pre-existing mechanisms in a culture to help transmit SEL skills. In Haiti, “Krik, Krak” stories are the equivalent to many cultures’ nursery rhymes and present an excellent platform for embedding SEL. By identifying and valuing elements that already exist in a culture, you strengthen your ability to connect with and reach more people. 

Let the Work Speak for Itself

Finally, sometimes you just have to let the work speak for itself. If you can demonstrate to a community that you do good work developing components of WCD in which they have expressed innate interest, such as academic skills, you will find that they are more likely to trust you if you want to introduce a new element, such as SEL, into your programming.

In the case of Strong Beginnings, the team recognized the value the community placed on academic skills and therefore invested in quality academic programming and teacher training that delivered real results. They demonstrated to the community that they weren’t going to skimp on the academics, and as a result, they later had more freedom to introduce SEL components to an already successful academic program. Ultimately, the SEL work ended up speaking for itself. When Strong Beginnings introduced morning meetings to the schools in which they had already built strong relationships, the schools were quick to recognize the impact the meetings had on not only their students’ but also their teachers’ days and supported the new additions with energy and enthusiasm. 

While these steps will not be the answer for every practitioner or program manager looking to take a WCD approach in their work, they are a great place to start and are a good reminder to slow down and understand the unique context in which we are striving for WCD.

Photos by Maxence Bradley.