By Madelyn Braho · Staff Writer
Dr. Andrew Mitchell, professor of history at the college, has an interest in what it means to live well that goes far beyond his chapel lecture the first week of November: For the last year and a half, he has been working on an update to the one-credit Healthful Living course.
When Mitchell was interviewed in January 2025, he indicated that the prospective class would have been more than just a new version of the basic health and wellness class. Instead, it would be something unique to the college.
“The idea is that we be able to have activities to combine at the same time physical growth and health, and spiritual growth or nourishment,” Mitchell explained. The class would meet once a week in person to learn about different habits that form us as people. This might range from stretching and exercising to praying for each other.
Creating this class is a solo project for Mitchell, however.
In April of 2024, the Provost asked him to make something out of “at least two years’ worth of multiple committee meetings.”
“That led me over the next several months to talk to people on campus, off campus … to try to come up with something that would be holistic, practical and attractive to the students,” Mitchell said in an interview in November. He discussed the project with professors from other educational institutions, including West Point.
When he met with the Curriculum and Instructional Committee last spring, the consensus was that the class would not be offered in the upcoming academic year.
Yet even though the class was not accepted, it was not the end of the idea.
“There were enough students who were enthusiastic about the idea that we informally did something over the course of the spring semester,” Mitchell recounted. Eleven students took part in the program, and according to Mitchell, some of the practices learned then are still followed by the students who took part.
This semester, Mitchell ran the “Habits of Wholeness” series, two 50-minute classes that followed the principles he had established with the class and that would “bring together faculty and students in a common exercise.”
The first class on Oct. 6 focused on breathing, incorporating Scripture and writings from both modern Christians and those of “wise pagans.” More recently, the Nov. 10 class emphasized healthy stretching.
Mitchell has been working on this project for over a year, and despite the disappointments, his enthusiasm for it has not died.
“The thing that has kept me going with the project has been the fact that students, all the time, seem to be excited by it,” Mitchell said.
For Mitchell, the Healthful Living course is not perfunctory, but full of potential. In an email about the Habits of Wholeness series, he asked, “How can our embodied selves develop meaningful, healthy trajectories at Grove City today?”
The aim of the project is more than a curriculum overhaul and instead focuses on examining “the holistic nature of what it means to be human,” Mitchell expressed.
