The nonfiction letter offers students an opportunity to study a dying art while also gaining insights about people, places, and eras. Teaching students the value of letters teaches community, caring, and connection. Whereas reading great works of literature can and does provide insight into life's purpose and meaning, the nonfiction text of a…

Explains the role of symbols in attaining total psychic growth by applying concepts of C. Jung, R. Assagiolo, and L. Kubie. Describes a new strategy, the symbolic identity technique, which involves environmental exploration in a relaxed, receptive manner in order to discover something in the outer environment that reflects one's inner nature.…

Describes three programs implemented in the Providence, Rhode Island, elementary schools to improve students' self-image. These include a guidance/puppetry program, student of the week awards, and a behavioral management system. (JAC)

Explains how the literary metaphor of the quest can be used as a tool in self-explorations. (MM)

Whitehead's analysis of experience can contribute to an understanding of the process of liberal education by distinguishing among the experiential bases and characters of various kinds of knowledge. Subjective experience is identified as the basis of all philosophical inquiry. (JN)

The California Legislature asked the State Department of Education to identify good school programs in the areas of self-concept, interpersonal skills, and parenting. This report describes various ways schools have improved programs and extracts factors or elements common to all the improvement efforts. Reports of visits to 12 exemplary programs…

The paper describes a program to teach high school students with emotional and behavior problems to count their feelings, thereby improving their self concept. To aid in instruction, a hierarchy was developed which involved four phases: counting tasks completed and tasks not completed, counting independent actions in class, counting perceptions of…

Discusses nihilism, Nietzsche's reevaluation of values, and Foucault's concept of "life as a work of art" as a way to give shape to one's life. Argues that current forms of popular pleasure are reminiscent of a revaluation to overcome nihilism. Educators need allow children to develop an image of themselves that they can live with.…

Describes an eight-week self-concept enhancement program for 28 seventh-grade students. Suggests specific activities, discussions topics and homework. Evaluation showed the students' self-concepts, measured by the Piers-Harris Children's Self Concept Scale, improved significantly compared to a control group. (JAC)

Self-concept development is basic to health education. Health educators should give students the "tools" to develop their own self-concept as a lifelong skill, rather than as a transitory interest. Several methods and activities exist that can improve human interaction, decision making, and personal growth. (FG)

Developing Understanding of Self and Others (DUSO) provides a variety of activities for developing understanding of self and others. Gifted students not only can learn from the activities as structured in the kit, but also are encouraged to imagine and create variations on these activities. (Author)

The Phoenix Curriculum for Students, a motivational program developed by the Phoenix Educational Foundation, is designed to help teachers provide both knowledge and self-esteem to students by gaining an understanding of their potential and an appreciation of themselves. (TE)

The Upward Bound Project for low income youth in Florida emphasizes humanistic education rather than education based on the capitalistic model of production, consumption, and competition. The project, which can serve as a model for education in developing countries, focuses on creating self-concepts and values to counteract those of an acquisitive…

The communication department at Western Michigan University has organized its program around a humanistic philosophy of education that places first priority on concerns related to student growth. The department views communication as those processes by which individuals, groups, organizations, and societies develop and function. The understanding…

Over the past five years the author has taught approximately 1000 students in experientially-oriented courses on the divorced and the widowed; of these 1000, about 300 were divorced women. Many of these divorcees (but not all, by any means) have shown considerable change in self image from the start to the end of the course. These changes are…