Spirituality, Ethnography, and Teaching

Today more than ever, we need an ethnography of spirit so we can identify and describe how spirit dwells and how it communicates. Our lives and our humanity depend on making the connection to spirit more visible and concrete to ourselves, to those we love, and to those we fail to understand. Educators have a special role to play in making the connection to spirit more visible and concrete. In this vital new book, a wide range of scholars and educators share stories about their own personal calls to spirituality. From the Amazon to the coast of Ireland, from the Talmud to the Book of Mormon, and in classrooms across the world, contributors explore the scenes in which spirit lives through insightful autoethnographic research and reporting. Spirituality, Ethnography, and Teaching is dedicated to the journey to the heart of teaching and learning. Each chapter reveals that spirituality, ethnography, and teaching are linked concretely in our experience of and desire for freedom. This collection of stories invites the reader to share in a way of knowing that discloses a radical union in which freedom, communication, and spirit coalesce. This ethnography of spirit calls upon the reader to dwell more deeply in the humanness of life and vocation and to let love flow.

Autorentext

The Editors: Will Ashton earned his doctorate in philosophy of communication from Southern Illinois University. His publications include articles on critical pedagogy, the work of Paulo Freire, and spirituality and teaching. He is co-editor of the book Spirituality, Action, and Pedagogy: Teaching from the Heart (Peter Lang, 2004).
Diana Denton earned her Ph.D. in holistic and aesthetic education from the University of Toronto. She integrates spirituality and the arts in her work as a professor, a poet, and a consultant. Her publications include poetry, articles on presence and phenomenology, and a book examining knowledge of poetics and the body in explorations of the heart In The Tenderness of Stone: Liberating Consciousness Through Awakening the Heart (1998). She is co-editor of Spirituality, Action, and Pedagogy: Teaching from the Heart (Peter Lang, 2004) and Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education (2005). Denton is Associate Chair in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo.

Inhalt

Contents: Will Ashton/Diana Denton: Introduction: Spirituality, Ethnography, and Teaching - Ronald J. Pelias: Negotiating Spirit - Larry Russell: From the Ash - Jim Perkinson: Pilgrimage, Rock, and Spirit - Kimiko Akita: The Professional Suicide of a Japanese Woman Teacher - Peninnah Schram: The Weaver's Thread: How Name, Story, and Prayer Form the Braid of My Spiritual Life - David C. Price: «THINK»: Transcending Unitarian and Mormon Teaching - Lori West Peterson: From Agnostic to Evangelical: How an Unlikely Conversion Birthed a Unique Convergence - Deanna L. Fassett: Calling - Caren S. Neile: An Intersession Carol: For Gloria Anzaldua, Teresa Brennan, and Stanford Lyman, with Apologies to Charles Dickens - Diana Denton: Re-Imagining the Wound: Of Innocence, Sacrifice & Gift - Carl Leggo: Attending to Winter: A Poetics of Research - Karen Meyer: Living Inquiry - A Gateless Gate and a Beach - Christopher N. Poulos: Dreaming, Writing, Teaching: Stories from Within Thin Places - Will Ashton: Worlds Apart: The Brujo, the Ayahuasca, and the Accidental Tourist - Kip Redick: Wilderness Trails, Spiritual Journeys, and Education - Isolde K. Anderson: Lost in Translation: Tracking Spirit during a Career Change - Sam Crowell/David Reid-Marr: Teaching from the Inside Out - Deborah Clark Vance: The Lessons of New Ventures - James Crocker-Lakness: Communication with Spirit - Anne Mancl: Following the Course of the Water - Elizabeth J. Tisdell: Teaching to the Music of My Soul: Catching on to the Beat of Learners' Hearts.