Spiritual awareness pedagogy: the classroom as spiritual reality

Abstract

Our theoretical orientation as educators is to teach with a spiritual foundation. Central to our perspective is that the classroom as an academic space is poised to facilitate profound spiritual evolution for students. A graduate course in psychotherapy using a Spiritual Awareness Pedagogy (SAP) offers students an opportunity to understand spiritual experience on the road to becoming psychologists, teachers, and healers. At the level of phenomenology, SAP holds that psychological events and mental illness index the extent to which we are living in a way consistent with a fundamental spiritual reality. Students are welcomed into bringing private, raw, neglected, and often discredited stories of lived experience to the foreground. Students and instructors together explore and integrate their impact, receive healing, and in turn envision how to tap this transcendent ground for others. Direct experience and imagination are given primacy along with logical positivist analysis and serve to create dynamic discussions with a life of their own. Classroom examples and reflections by students in their own words, as well as reflections of teachers, will be illustrated.

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