Intentional Design for Teaching the Whole Student: Applying the Learning Systems Paradigm

Tertiary education in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere endeavors to teach the whole student by addressing personal development, sustained employability, and active citizenship. Teaching the whole student responsibly, however, requires intentional design of learning experiences that moves students beyond course and module content to see how approaches to that content establish foundations for these three domains. This paper will argue that the Learning Systems Paradigm (Jankowski and Marshall 2017) offers a heuristic for responsibly constructing learning experiences that achieve this end. The Learning Systems Paradigm, originally discerned from a study of praxis in approximately 800 institutions, promotes an approach to design that is driven by four key elements: 1) consensus-based understandings of outcomes, 2) alignment of learning experiences, 3) efforts to be student-centered, and 4) clear communication among colleagues and with students. Working within the paradigm enables educators to develop curricula and pedagogies that attend to student development by making learning and transfer of knowledge transparent.