Second International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing

Book excerpt: 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.