Whole person learning

Valerie Wilkinson, Faculty of Informatics, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan
Valerie A. Wilkinson received her B.A. and M.A in Classics at the University of Hawaii. She first went to Japan in 1980. She chose to get her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Culture, with an emphasis on Medieval Romance, Philosophy, and Allegorical Exegesis. Her rule was to study, to the extent possible, exactly what she chose. Although she was a Medievalist, she made the conscious decision to move into the field of Communication, where living systems and experiential learning are important. While at The Open University of Japan, she worked with distance education and wrote about Gregory Bateson’s “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.”

One line in Bateson’s Mind and Nature (7), “Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality,” confirmed her teaching practice of engineering experiential learning for whole persons in whole systems. Putting her Classical and Medieval base together with a growing fascination with General Systems Theory has given her viable resources, to apply paradoxical wisdom from the ancients to the shifting scene in the STEM educational environment of Faculty of Informatics at Shizuoka University in Hamamatsu, Japan.