Cheryl Hunt and Linden West
Engaging with spirit: researching spirituality in adult learning
Cheryl Hunt
University of Exeter, UK
Linden West
Canterbury Christ Church University, UK
Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
What is happening, in my view, is that there is a new spiritual awareness. We are in the consensus building process about who we are as human beings, who we are as spiritual beings
(James Redfield, 1997, in Foreman, 2004: 7)
Introduction
This paper is based on a seminar series funded between January 2004 and March 2006 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) entitled Researching spirituality as a dimension of lifelong learning. It has been closely linked to SCUTREA from its inception. Together with colleagues from North America, we presented a symposium on spirituality (Hunt et al., 2001) at the last SCUTREA international conference. This provided stimulus for a research proposal which we submitted to the ESRC the following year. Though well-received it was not funded - but we subsequently drew on it in writing the seminar series proposal. The series comprised six open meetings and five closed meetings of the core group of seven members. Two of the open seminars were run as pre- and post-conferences to the Annual SCUTREA Conferences in 2004 and 2005 respectively.
Our purpose here is to close that cycle of events by reporting back on some of the issues it has raised. In particular, we want to suggest that exploration in the realm of spirituality requires a research orientation which includes both an understanding and appreciation of mythopoesis and what we term an ‘auto/biographical imagination’. This involves an in-depth, open hearted and thoughtful engagement with the complexity of our own experience as well as that of others. However, even in making that suggestion, we feel placed in a defensive position in the face of the current outcomes-driven, outward-looking research climate in British universities. Implicit in what follows, therefore, are questions associated with the first and second themes of this conference: the nature of educational research and who determines significant questions.
In order to provide a theoretical context for the issues raised, the next section contains an abbreviated version of the background to the proposal for the series, together with its aims.
Background
NB: Because of constraints on word-length, only references to direct quotations are included below. The full text of the proposal and reference list is available at: [April 2006]
Spirituality is a highly contested concept but we start from the view that: ‘Human beings are essentially spiritual creatures because we are driven by a need to ask “fundamental” or “ultimate” questions … to find meaning and value in what we do and experience’ (Zohar and Marshall, 2000: 4). We also associate spirituality with the capacity to be fully alive and connected to every aspect of existence, including inter-personal relationships, psychological processes and the global environment. Some people seek guidance and resolution in such matters using religious teachings and traditions; others within a humanistic framework that is often shaped by principles of social justice (e.g. Van Ness [1996] refers to ‘secular’, and Berry [1988] to ‘public’ [action-oriented] spirituality). Some may reject the language of spirituality altogether but espouse what might nevertheless be called ‘spiritual values’ in their lives and work through their commitment to others (e.g. English, 2000: 30, refers to ‘Care, concern and outreach to others [as] integral aspects of authentic spirituality’).
Despite the contested nature of the concept, there is a proliferation of popular literature on spirituality; of informal study groups involved in spiritual exploration; and of notions of spirituality within many healing therapies. In business: ‘Examples of the human resource development movement encroaching on spiritual domains abound’ (Fenwick and Lange, 1998: 70). Government rhetoric and policy sometimes assumes links between spirituality/spiritual values, processes of lifelong learning, and citizenship. Nevertheless, research into the place of spirituality in adults’ learning and in professional practice in adult education, training, and related areas remains limited, especially within the UK.
English and Gillen (2000: 2) note that: ‘Adult educators have paid a great deal of attention to the aesthetic, social, emotional, physical, intellectual, and other aspects of education but have neglected the equally important spiritual dimension … to omit the spiritual dimension is to ignore the importance of a holistic approach to adult learning as well as the complexity of the adult learner’. This omission may be due less to individual educators/researchers than to the direction in which educational policy-making, and the discourses through which it is shaped, have pushed their work. Though ostensibly designed to promote lifelong learning, recent UK policies have often been primarily concerned with ‘worklong learning’ (Hunt, 1999). Focusing mainly on ‘securing our economic future’ (DfEE, 1998: 1) they have stressed the need for qualifications and links with employment. In so doing, they have marginalized other means by which adults may find meaning and purpose in their lives and communities, and inhibited the emergence of alternative discourses and research paradigms.
These seminars will bring together educators and others who work with adults in educational settings. … We feel it is essential not simply to examine and generate research about spirituality, but also to explore reflexively our personal understandings of spirituality and how these are played out in our own research and practice. This accords with Schön’s (1983) work on the reflective practitioner, which stresses the need for professionals to examine ‘theories-in-use’ as well as espoused theories, and with the ‘biographical turn’ in studies of professional practice and personal behaviours (West, 1996). Such approaches require educators/researchers to articulate and examine what they know, how they know it, and their own influence in research and other professional relationships.
One aspect of the proposed seminars will therefore be to conduct a co-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996) into spirituality as an element of participants’ personal meaning-making and professional practices. This is important because, in Heron’s terms (op.cit.: 20), ‘Propositions about human experience … are of questionable validity if they are not grounded in the researchers’ experience’. Approaching learning as a ‘situated experience’ (Boud et al, 1993; Haggis, 2002; Hunt, 1998), this inquiry will generate its own data which will contribute to, and be interrogated in the light of, the small but growing body of research on the nature and significance of spirituality in contemporary Britain, and of emerging American research on spirituality and adult learning. It will be open to views arising from new scientific epistemologies (e.g. in quantum, chaos and complexity theories) that ‘indeterminacy’ (Prigogine, 1989) is a legitimate framework for scientific research - and may have implications for educational research and analysis.
Aims
1. To develop, through a series of seminars bringing together educators and researchers from a number of different disciplines and professional backgrounds, a forum for debating the function of spirituality in, and its implications for, lifelong learning.
2. Within this forum, to explore understandings of spirituality and of research methodologies appropriate to such investigation.
3. To support the research of members of the group, foster collaboration and cross-fertilisation, including internationally, and encourage wide dissemination of this work.
Ethos
One of the open seminars was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Organisational Spirituality (ICOS)[1]in which there were approximately 200 participants. We set a maximum of 24 participants[2] in each of the other five because we wanted to encourage genuine participation. To this end we circulated the following information well in advance of each seminar:
Background note
This seminar is part of a series, funded by the ESRC, designed to explore the nature of spirituality as a neglected area of lifelong learning and how we can come to understand its significance, expression and meaning more fully. Throughout the series, we have deliberately tried not simply to ‘talk about’ spirituality but to ‘ground’ all our discussions in the experiences of participants, including those giving invited presentations. So far, we have also refrained from attempting to define ‘spirituality’ prematurely, although there is some consensus that a sense of interconnectedness lies at its root. We accept that spirituality as a state of being and believing can be understood as part of many faith traditions as well as outside of them, and that the conceptual frameworks for such understanding encompass both Eastern and Western insights and values, some of which may not be easily reconcilable. We hope that all participants in the seminar will be willing to share their experiences, and value those of others, in a spirit of co-operative exploration.
Aim of the day
To explore ways in which ‘spirituality’ is encountered in, and may help to shape, the processes of learning in formal and informal educational contexts; and the extent to which professionals can/should be concerned with a spiritual dimension of learning, including as a topic for research.
The five seminars all followed the same format. We began and ended with a one-minute period of silence. The purpose of this was three-fold: to create a sense of stillness in order to enable participants to ‘drop the baggage’ they brought individually into the room and thereby to enter freshly into the collective activities of the day; to signify the importance of working co-operatively, valuing the presence of others and giving them full attention; and to acknowledge the silence (sometimes called ‘deep peace’) out of which all activity arises. The first session (usually of at least an hour) was designated as ‘a space for all participants to introduce themselves and their particular interest in the seminar’. This was followed by a presentation and discussion of work-in-progress by an invited speaker and then a general discussion on ‘How (if at all) does “spirituality” impact upon participants’ own learning and/or work?’. In the afternoon, there was a SCUTREA-style 90-minute session in which two invited speakers gave presentations. Small-group work then took place in which participants were invited to discuss connections between issues raised during the day and their own practice; and to make suggestions about how the work of the seminar series might be taken forward. There was a final plenary session for feedback from the groups and reflections on the day.
A full set of notes about each event was subsequently circulated to all participants with an invitation to return further comments or feedback.
Feedback
The ‘reflections’ at the end of each day were all remarkably positive and, for the most part, we felt we had honoured our intention to make the seminars genuinely participative and, therefore, congruent with our sense of spirituality having to do with ‘interconnectedness’, ‘a search for meaning’ and ‘situated experience’. What pleasantly surprised us was the warmth and richness of the responses that many participants sent after the seminars. These have been collated into a document of nearly 5,000 words: they are qualitatively different from the kinds of responses usually elicited on formal evaluation forms. Some extracts are included below for illustration, after which we will give our own brief reflections on the series and the issues it raises.
A few people said they chose to write reflectively after a seminar for their own benefit as well as ours. For example:
PhD student (February 2005)
I feel I should write about my experience of the spirituality seminar I have just attended in order to record it, and also to try to understand it better. I want to record my experience because I fear losing it – already, as I sit on a train, on my way back, I feel it slipping away. I can imagine myself, at home, slowly and rather unenthusiastically ploughing through the interview transcripts I am currently analysing. Today I regained enthusiasm for my PhD, gained confidence in my ability to complete it, and, amazingly, acquired a bit of self-esteem as well. I am afraid of losing these things and hope that by writing my experience down I will be able to capture and keep it.
I also write in order to try to better understand my experience. At the moment, it’s a jumble of emotions, pictures and words floating inside me. I want to untangle that jumble and record it in a way that will be accessible to my future self, a self who I know will not be able to access the felt experience. I am aware, though, that in recording my experience, I will change it. The ball of knotted, jumbled, intertwined threads that form my experience will not only be untangled as a result of my writing, they will also be knitted together to form some sort of finished product. And those threads that cannot be part of the finished product, the threads that don’t fit, or that can’t be untangled, or that break during the untangling process, will be lost. But I cannot avoid this. And I know that the whole experience will be lost unless I write about it right now.
Where do I begin? The threads have no obvious order. I’ll begin, then, with the most important thread. For me, the most important experience was the honest, real, and congruent communication that I took part in. Communication within an ‘I’-‘thou’ relationship that allowed me in some way to access and to be enriched by part of the other person. I will contrast that with the communication experience I have just had with a man working on the train:
[an account of a conversation in the buffet car is given]
I experienced none of the man’s humanity in that little exchange, and I feel sad. Sad and invisible. Yet I often interact with robots and frequently, I am a robot myself. And until now, I hadn’t even noticed. For most of today, though, I was real. It felt good, and I liked myself. I felt as if I was floating. Most days I feel as if I am walking uphill, but today I was floating. I was simply being and simply seeing, rather than trying, doing, thinking and judging…
Many participants commented on ‘nourishing’ and ‘inspiring’ aspects of the seminars and/or the significance of the topic:
Diocesan educational adviser (February 2006)
Many, many thanks for the most wonderful day yesterday. It really was nourishing and inspirational.
Teacher educator (February 2006)
… there was a rich blend of theory and practice to challenge our minds and nourish our souls! I do hope you will be able to take this work forward as it highlights a key ingredient in life-long learning that has for too long been overlooked or under-explored.
Research and teaching fellow (February 2005)
I left feeling very excited that I'd found a way to unite all parts of myself and my work. I discovered that the connection was 'me'! I also left feeling inspired to draw explicitly upon my spirituality in my teaching and my research, rather than to hide it as something not 'valid' in academic / professional space. Hearing from other people who are doing similar has definitely increased my knowledge and confidence.
University lecturer (June 2005)
I left feeling amazed and inspired by the way people treated one another - the respect and valuing of one another which is a contrast to daily organisational life. I welcomed the opportunity to be in that environment.
Community worker (April 2005)
The discussion of spirituality without it being a theology argument is very 'young' in academia but at least it has commenced and you have definitely put it on the map - well done and thank you.
University lecturer (February 2005)
My scepticism about the usefulness of this topic has had a serious jolt!
Reflections
Although the core group took a co-operative inquiry approach to the exploration of their own understandings of spirituality and issues arising from the seminars, the seminar series was obviously not a research project. However, as a result of it, we have become convinced that further exploration in the realm of spirituality will require a research orientation which includes both an understanding and appreciation of mythopoesis and what we terman ‘auto/biographical imagination’.
Mythopoesis means, literally, ‘myth-making’; a ‘myth’ being a story, often based on archetypal figures, which embodies ideas about social, natural, and sometimes supernatural, phenomena. Thus, mythopoesis can be used to refer to the process of sense-making by which individuals come to know their world and relationship with it. This process is largely unconscious and beyond words, often linked to ‘the heart not the head’, so it may be more appropriately described as one by which individuals ‘feel’ their world. In terms of Heron’s (1996) model of ‘levels of knowing’, the process embodies both ‘experiential knowing’, where experience is never of something or someone else but always an experience with the other, and ‘presentational knowing’ where this felt-experience is translated into images that can be encapsulated in the form of art, music, poetry and so on – as well as within the often unspoken myths we each create out of, and feed back into, our own lived, everyday experiences.
Until very recently, the ‘heart-felt’ knowledge of mythopoesis has been virtually excluded from academia where positivist traditions of Western science have long been privileged. This exclusion is not really surprising since mythopoesis operates not simply as an individual process but is one which helps to shape and define organizations, societies and civilizations: it underpins how we become socialised into our own cultures and historical time – and ‘explains’ why it can be so difficult to challenge and change established traditions.