Reclaiming Our Roots: Spirituality as an Integral Part of Adult Learning

Abstract

After a long hibernation, spirituality is no longer a taboo word in adult education and training. It has been recently reclaimed by some of the very authors who appear in this issue--Elizabeth Tisdell, Cheryl Hunt, Tara Fenwick, and John Dirkx. These writers acknowledge that interest in spirituality has deep roots in our field, from the early years with Yeaxlee, and on through to the writings of Lindeman, Freire, and Horton. In this issue of Adult Learning, we contribute to the recent conversation about spirituality, and offer perspectives on the questions that confront us as practitioners, including how to develop our own spirituality, how to ask critical questions of our motivations, and how to meet learners in their spiritual quest. We offer guidance on incorporating spiritual dimensions into teaching, learning, and researching and we leave considerable room for the readers' response. The authors in this issue of Adult Learning are by and large working with a or spirituality (Berry, 1988), as distinguished from a religious spirituality. A public spirituality is worked out in the everyday world of human existence and may or may not have a religious or institutional dimension. This is a spirituality of living and being, which is broad enough to be inclusive of all practices and beliefs; its focus is on the living of relationship and the development of our meaning-making capacity as adults. Most telling of the kind of spirituality that we are talking about here is a story told of Fr. Jimmy Tompkins, one of the founders of the Antigonish Movement, a socio-economic and adult education movement to organize miners and fishers in eastern Nova Scotia into cooperatives and credit unions. Fr. Jimmy was at a conference in the United States when a fellow delegate approached him and said, understand you are making good Catholics of all those Nova Scotia fishermen. Father Tompkins was appalled. He retorted, God help us, can you tell me any Catholic way of canning lobsters? (Kidd, 1975, p. 244). Similarly, ours is a public, secular type of spirituality that asks questions of meaning, purpose, and motivation. Questioning Our Practice One of the key questions for all of us as adult educators and learners is how a public or secular spirituality can best be brought to bear on our teaching, researching, and learning processes. We suggest that a regular examination of our educational practice is in order. Building on the work of Rolph (1991), we offer this list of challenging questions: * Do I challenge learners to interpret meaning for their lives? * Do I provide time periods for reflection and inner exploration? * Does my teaching encourage learners to find the spiritual dimensions of everyday life? * Do I integrate religion, literature, poetry, art, and music into my teaching, and help learners search for the meaning and value that they contain? * Do I spend time fostering my own spiritual life? * Do I engage students as subjects (not objects) of their own learning? These are just some of the questions that we invite readers to explore as they move through this collection of articles (see also English, Fenwick, & Parsons, 2003). Thinking deeply about these questions may indeed be a way to enter into the dialogue and to foster the tenets of spirituality in our work. What the Authors Say The authors in this issue of Adult Learning have taken the adult quest for meaning seriously and have focused on a variety of issues in applying spirituality to practice, in order to enhance the meaning-making capacity? The first two articles emphasize the value of educators being in touch with their own spiritual journey. Al Lauzon focuses on the ways that the professional and spiritual boundaries are blurred when we begin to think about spirituality. …