Fostering the Learner Spirituality of Students

Fostering the Learner Spirituality of Students

Angela Henry

Gigi Brown

Abstract:

Adult education and community education are two fields of study that advocate the incorporation of spirituality as a component of teaching to the whole person.  Adult educators provide examples of ways to address spirituality, and some community educator’s advocate for incorporating spirituality in the curriculum as one aspect of teaching adult learners.  The purpose of this study is to help adult learners perceive the influence of spirituality in their learning.

The purpose of this literary review is to articulate, the successes and challenges experienced while attempting to foster the spiritual learning in adult learning environment. A definition of the term learner spirituality, as well as its related phrases will be provided.   Another way, we will look at Spirituality is the spiritual journey, how can I be a life- long learner of spiritual education. The paper will focus on individual’s personal experience and an individual’s personal journey. This paper will examine why it is important for scholars to research this topic.

A literature review about how to foster learner spirituality within the various environments will be addressed.  An implication of this study is that in order for teachers to influence the learning spirituality of students, teachers need to cogitate on their own learner spirituality.  By accentuating the importance of teachers performing regular self-assessments of their own spirituality in an effort to bolster the learning spirituality of their students.

Introduction:

The spiritual learner is someone who realizes there is something beyond ourselves that influences and accounts for life events—an intangible that cannot completely be explained. For many this is the work of God; for others it is the work of the “Universe;” and for others it is simply an undefined spiritual experience. A spiritual learner is a person who takes in information from diverse sources, and in terms of religion, he or she is a person who realizes and accepts that all the major religions have made worthwhile contributions. A spiritual learner is an open-minded person who expects to continue to gain wisdom about the human condition throughout life. He or she expects to revise theories and change perspective as new learning takes place. He or she is not wedded to one way of thinking, one psychology or one religious orientation. This is important to living a balanced, healthy, high-achieving life because we are constantly faced with new situations that require that we adapt and change. 

The perspective of being a spiritual learner can be applied to most aspects of life; any fixed way of thinking and behaving that has rendered an unhealthy outcome should be reevaluated. Individuals of this persuasion are not threatened to reconsider behavioral patterns that have become entrenched but may need adjusting, or may need to be totally abandoned.

Being a spiritual learner naturally gives us the tools to rewrite our story; remember part of the definition is “to learn from all credible sources,” including ourselves. This means we now have an opportunity to take in accurate information about ourselves, our beliefs, our career paths and most importantly, our culture, country, and world. We cannot live free of the curse if we are not concerned with people throughout the world. Personal liberation requires an awareness of the fact that certain societies, cultures, and organizations create systems that enslave others If we are self-absorbed and just tend to those closest to us who are most like us, we create a small non-diverse world which limits our personal and spiritual growth. In essence, the well-being of others is our well-being. There is no separation for the spiritual learner. Our story can now be rewritten because we trust the opinions of others, and in a global sense, we trust that those around the world have important insights and wisdom to contribute.

The purpose of spiritual learning is to awaken with what is deepest, truest, and most alive in us and in life.  In many regards spiritual learning is a pathway to your inner knowing.  Some basics for spiritual learning include the following:

•         It's about the message and not the messenger. The teacher is just a relay station or a helpful        

           bridge back to yourself. No one stays on a bridge. They use it to cross over.

•         Using multiple sources. Lots of people say lots of stuff. Sometimes it's helpful when exploring   

           different spiritual tools (meditation, chanting, etc.) to see what multiple sources have to say about      

           the tool before using it. However, when it comes to your inner knowing, you don't want to be

           checking with lots of external sources to validate your inner knowing.

•         Checking information with your inner knowing--finding what feels true. This is a big one for most

           people, because you don't feel like you're tuned into it.

•         Memorization is secondary or tertiary. Just because you can tell me all the Commandments or the

           4 Noble Truths of Buddhism doesn't mean you're living by them.

•         Challenge untruths. If something is said to you that doesn't feel truth, challenge it. Challenge the

           source. You don't have to, of course.

 Spiritual Learning can include learning in classes, from writings, information, and interactions through practices, meeting, talks, work, and other efforts.    Spiritual learning helps us grow in clarity, wisdom, faith, calmness, and compassion; to develop a deeper honesty within oneself and self-acceptance. It supports us in cultivating our ability to let go, our capacity to forgive and be forgiven, our capacity to be fully present and profoundly alive in this moment.

Scholars study spiritual learning to educate and guide students on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world.  Some researchers believe spiritual learning teaches us to cultivate the art of making connections.  Cultivating connections welcomes different thoughts and ideas.  This also helps the spiritual learners to express themselves and to be creative.  Some scholars believe spiritual learning makes life clearer and help us learn how to take better care of ourselves and others.   

This allows us to be the model empathy and a love of diversity.  This will also help us to see the commonalities that tie us to others and to respect differences as well. 

The Goals of Spiritual Learning:

Learning Objectives:

Upon completion of reading, assimilation, and application of this section of instruction, the learner should be able to:

·        Explain how spiritual learning differs from secular learning.

·        List the three major domains of spiritual learning,

·        List the three stages of development for each domain.

The goals of spiritual learning are as different from secular learning as the experience of spiritual conversion is different from that of learning how to operate a weed eater.

Explain how spiritual learning differs from secular learning

Spiritual learning includes: (1) increasing in your knowledge and understanding of God's Word, (2) decreasing in your frequency and severity of sin, (3) increasing in your practice of Christ-like qualities, and (4) increasing in your faith and trust in God. Perhaps the best summary of spiritual learning is becoming more like Jesus Christ. In 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul says, "Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ." Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of what it truly means to be spiritual.

Secular learning recognizes that students must advance beyond information gathering to understanding, application, and evaluation of facts. Spiritual learning, however, involves yet additional domains, such as faith and action. Spiritual learning targets change in character and growth in love, faith, and conduct. The spiritual teacher must realize that they are dealing with the whole person, the entire being. “

List the three major domains of spiritual learning:

It is essential to understand methods of accessing minds and motivating people to action.

There is a sense in which knowledge, understanding, and application of Bible facts assume faith and action outcomes. The spiritual teacher, however, may unwittingly ignore vital methods that teach to the other domains and the levels of each.

Cognitive development begins with the acquisition of Bible facts or information. It progresses to an understanding of those facts, and then to application and evaluation.

Faith development begins with interest on the part of the learner and progresses to faith, and then to love.

Action development begins with imitation, then moves to practice, and finally to habit.

It is generally understood in educational circles that learning has as much to do with attitude, emotions, and belief as it does with acquisition of information. Unless teachers of spiritual education give attention to feelings and attitudes, they will not reach the desired potential for change. For example, teachers may wish for their class members to experience a sense of urgency concerning conduct in the light of the soon return of Jesus. The teacher may attempt to hammer home the truth of the investigative judgment. Teachers may do this in an overbearing or pompous manner, condemning or ridiculing class members to the extent that the members reject the Bible truth. Teachers who approach instruction in this manner ignore the fact that it is equally essential to understand methods of accessing minds and motivating people to action. Experiential learning focuses on teaching to each level of each domain.

Three Domains of Spiritual Teaching
Cognitive	Faith	Action
3. Application	3. Love	3. Habit
2. Understanding	2. Belief	2. Practice
1. Information	1. Interest	1. Imitation

List the three stages of development for each domain:

This certification course identifies and teaches methods of instruction for three domains of spiritual learning:

1. The cognitive domain deals with knowledge.

2. The faith domain deals with the dynamics of the new birth.

3. The action domain deals with behavior.

All three domains must be integrated into spiritual learning, yet the course will focus on each separately for the sake of clarity.

The need for education beyond a mere transfer of information is underscored by prophetic counsel: “The lesson which Christ gave to Nicodemus is important to every teacher, to every Sabbath school worker, to every youth and child. It is certainly important that we become acquainted with the reasons of our faith, but the most important knowledge to be gained is the experimental knowledge of what it means to be born again. The great want in our Sabbath school work is the want of the light of life. All through our ranks are needed men and women who have learned at the feet of Jesus what truth is, and how to present it to others. It requires holy men, men who have humility, who are abiding in Christ, to be educators of our youth in the Sabbath school” (Counsels on Sabbath School Work, pp. 64, 65).

The teacher needs to understand and apply principles of instruction that take into account each domain and each level of each domain for spiritual learning. Christianity is dependent upon a power outside human ability; yet spiritual learning does not take place in a vacuum. Jesus was a master teacher. The parable was one of the most advanced and effective teaching devices of His day. The spiritual teacher must employ methods that teach to each domain.

Different types of spirituality learning:

It can be helpful to learn more about different spiritualties in order to understand and respect them.  The bottom line in the end is accepting that everyone is different;

this can help in practicing tolerance and empathy.  

Understanding different types of spiritually

The first way of beginning to respect different forms of spirituality is to learn about them. Even if you don’t agree with the premise of the spirituality or disagree with the point of someone practicing spirituality, learning more about it could help you respect the practice. There is a lot of misinformation about spirituality in the community, so learning about what it really is can help you gain an understanding and respect.

Ways you can do this –

·         Read a book about spirituality

·         Go to talks and presentations around different forms of spirituality

·        Talk to people you know who identify themselves as ‘spiritual’ about their experience

Practice empathy

Though spirituality may not work for you, it’s worth thinking about why it might work for other people. Different people use spirituality for different things, but trying to learn why a person seeks solace in spirituality might help with understanding it a bit more. Everyone comes to spirituality for a different reason and it’s a very personal thing, but some reasons people begin practicing spirituality include –

·        They have spiritual faith but are no longer religious

·        They grew up in a family that embraced spirituality

·        They want to explore the meaning of life

·        They have experienced loss or grief

·        They think it might help with stress or release of emotions

The bottom line just like gaining cultural understanding about someone who comes from a different country or culture, understanding more about spirituality might help ease some pre–existing assumptions and inherited prejudices you may have. However, learning more about spirituality does not mean you have to practice it yourself. Spirituality is an entirely personal thing, so you should never feel pressured or forced to engage in the practice.

Recommendations to be a better lifelong spiritual learner:

How does one go about being a lifelong spiritual learner? Perhaps one of the best places to start is with Jesus’ response to a question about what is the most important commandment.

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” – Matthew 22:37-40

As people of faith, it is important to nurture our spiritual side through a variety of means. Theologians such as Richard Foster, author of the book Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, suggest that we learn to love God and our neighbors better through the practices that strengthen our intellect, our emotions, our lives in relationship and our lives of service. We tend to get comfortable doing the same type of faith practice year after year. If we think about a variety of ways to experience and grow in our relationship with God, it can be life affirming and life nurturing.

·        Get involved in a Bible study that will stretch your knowledge. Find out about life in biblical times and what the lessons are for today.

·        Spend time daily in a worship type of activity. This could be prayer, a worship service, listening to music or sitting on the porch watching the beauty of nature around you. Be intentional about noticing the handiwork of God.

·        Get together. Time spent with those we care about and in Christian community are opportunities to celebrate our connections. Conversations and being together serve as reminders that our lives are not intended to be lived in isolation.

·        Put your faith into action. This may be the practice we think of least often as a chance to grow in faith, yet it all about “loves our neighbors as ourselves.” Service is the giving away of our love and concern to others. In response, we often find that we learn as much or even more than those we serve. It is simply God at work in us.

Finding Your Own Spiritual Light:

I believe that each person is sitting on a spiritual gold mine of their own rich experiences that can make life much happier and more meaningful. We note some experiences, but many more are missed: many of life's lessons are lost because of lack of awareness. Writing down and sharing our experiences are a great way to focus on what life is trying to teach us. This site may become a forum where others can share their spiritual lessons from life.

Finding your own spiritual lessons as they unfold from the events in your life is a skill that grows with practice. This skill can be developed through the use of spiritual exercises -- which are simply any of a wide range of activities that help broaden our spiritual awareness. There are different types of spiritual exercises because people have different states of awareness -- the only way to discover if one will be helpful for you is to try it for yourself. It may not work to your satisfaction the first time, so you may need to practice it several times. Or you may choose a different spiritual exercise that is more in tune with your present state of consciousness.

Spiritual Pathways

Just as we have different personalities and temperaments, we each gravitate toward unique ways to connect with God and refresh ourselves spiritually. One of the greatest benefits of knowing our spiritual temperament is the ability to build on that strength without feeling guilty for our weaknesses.

A spiritual pathway is the way we most naturally connect with God and grow spiritually.

Each of us has a “preferred” spiritual pathway, and we naturally gravitate to that way of connecting with God. Most of us don’t use just one; we tend to prefer one or two main pathways. There’s also usually at least one pathway that is very unnatural for us, and it takes some stretching for us to experiment using that pathway. Identifying and developing your unique spiritual pathway(s) can help you experience God’s presence in your ordinary day. Once you’ve discovered your pathway, the goal is for you to feel great freedom and joy in using it.

Relational Spritual Pathway

Characteristics:

·        Spiritual growth comes most naturally when you’re involved in significant relationships.

·        Small groups and other community life experiences are key.

·        Your life is an open book and you’re surprised when others aren’t as open as you are.

·        Being alone can drive you crazy.

·        In times of growth (like confronting sin, guidance for decisions, accountability, expressions of love, etc.) God will often speak to you through other people.

·

Some Cautions:

·        Guard against becoming all head and no heart.

·        Don’t confuse being smart with being spiritually mature.

·        Remember that the right gauge of spiritual health and maturity

·        is love, not intelligence.

·        You love to be right and that can be dangerous.

·        Ways to Stretch:

·        Devote yourself to corporate worship and private adoration and prayer – let your learning lead to worship.

·        Engage in self-examination to assess whether or not you are being loving as you interact and share your knowledge.

Spiritual Intellectual Pathway

Characteristics:

·        You draw close to God as you’re able to learn more about Him.

·        The study of Scripture and theology comes naturally to you.

·         You have little patience for emotional approaches to faith.

·         You are a thinker (thinking trumps feeling).

·        When you face problems or spiritual challenges, you go into a problem-solving mode.

·        (you could do with less music and more sermon)

Worship Pathway

Characteristics:

·        You have a deep love of corporate praise and a natural inclination toward celebration.

·         In difficult periods of life, worship is one of the most healing activities you engage in.

·         In worship, your heart opens up and you come alive and enthusiastically participate (you’d like more singing and less sermon).

·        Build on Strengths:

·        Experience worship on a regular basis.

·        Use worship tapes or CDs and make your car a private sanctuary.

·        Learn about other worship traditions and incorporate what you learn into your personal worship time.Some Cautions:

·        Be careful not to judge those who aren’t as expressive as you in worship – don’t assume they don’t love God as much or aren’t experiencing the Holy Spirit.

·        Guard against an experience-based spirituality that always has you looking for the next “high.”

Ways to Stretch:

·        Engage in the discipline of study – make sure your mind is filled with knowledge of God and to keep that area growing so that your heart and emotions are solidly rooted.

·        Serve God in concrete ways as an extension of your worship.

·        Remain committed to your community of faith even when worship isn’t all you’d like it to be.

Activist Pathway

Characteristics:

·        You have a single-minded zeal and a very strong sense of vision.

·        You have a passion to build the church; a passion to work for justice.

·        Challenges don’t discourage you, they energize you.

·        You do everything you can to bring out the potential God has placed in other people.

·        You love a high-paced, problem-filled, complex, strenuous way of life.

Build on Strengths:

·        Create a sense of challenge in your life by immersing yourself in tasks that demand the best you have to offer.

·        Find a team of people you can invest in and work with to accomplish big goals.

·        Stay active – when you’re not active you get frustrated and stagnant.

Some Cautions:

·        You may run over people or use them because you’re so focused on the goal.

·        Guard against going too long without pausing to reflect on what you’re doing; otherwise you can end up not even knowing your own motive, spiritual condition, or emotional state.

Ways to Stretch:

·        Spend time in solitude and silence – striking a balance with actions helps to raise awareness of inner motives.

·        Cultivate a reflective discipline like journaling.

·        Develop close spiritual friendships with one or two people – have them ask you how they see God working in you, not through you.

Make the most of your Spiritual Pathway

Give yourself permission to be who you are in God. Celebrate your pathway and enjoy it. Be willing to engage in activities that move you out of your comfort zone and force you to stretch a little. Each pathway has strengths and cautions. It’s easy to default only towards our strengths and forget that we need to grow in other areas as well. Don’t fall into the trap of saying “Oh, I’m a relationship type so I’m off the hook with solitude.” One of the cautions for those who have a relational pathway is to guard against being overly influenced by others, so solitude is an important stretching exercise – even though it may never come naturally. For each pathway, the cautions or temptations will tell you where you need to stretch. Be careful not to envy someone else’s pathway. It may be easy to think, “The activists are the ones who really get things done in this world. I’m not like that, so I guess I’ll always be second-class.” Embrace the unique person God made you to be.

Beware of the temptation to judge someone else because of his or her pathway. A contemplative may think, “What’s the matter with those activists? Why can’t they pray for long periods of time like I can? Don’t they have any depth?” Part of growing in community means we learn to neither envy nor judge each other, but help and learn from one another. Explore and develop the other pathways. Most people can relate easily to more than one. You may find several of them important to your spiritual growth – but at some point every one of them can be useful to you.

Conclusion:

Spirituality and prayer also provide people with an opportunity to engage in a meditative act. Meditation has been shown to have a strong link with well-being because it calms the body, reduces stress and anxiety, and also supports positive thinking. The cultivation of “sacred moments” in daily life, whether through journal-writing or daily spiritual exercises, has been associated with reduced levels of stress and an increase in psychological well-being. Finally, both spirituality and organized religion can help provide people with perspective, hope, and a deeper sense of meaning. By believing in something greater than themselves, it may help them stay positive in times of sadness, and foster resilience in its role as a coping strategy.

Spirituality in Adult Education has historically had quite an important influence in the adult education field (English 2005), though often the connection has been more implicit. Even though spirituality is generally seen as an individual’s experiences of what is perceived as sacred, how one frames or understands those experiences can strongly influence one’s beliefs and behaviors. In living out their spirituality, some people focus more on its inward activities such as prayer, meditation, and experiences of wholeness; others focus more on how it influences their outer action in the world, and they might not discuss spirituality per se unless asked about it directly (Merriam 2008, p 28).

References:

Spirituality in Adult and Higher Education. ERIC Digest. (2014). www.ericdigests.org.

About the Spiritual Learning Endeavor. (2014). http://www.spiritual-learning.com  

Erin Dragonsong. What Is The Difference Between Religion And Spirituality? (200602014). http://www.wicca-spirituality.com

What is a Spiritual Learner? (2009). www.balanceyoursuccess.com

Jennifer M. Pigza & Marshall J. Welch.  Spiritually Engaged Pedagogy:  The Possibilities of Spiritual Development Through Social Justice Education. Volume V, Issue 4. (2003-2010). http://spirituality.ucla.edu. 

What is a Spiritual Learner? (2014). http://www.thecurseofthecapable.com

Spiritual Awakening Process.  Learning How to Learn on the Spiritual Path. (January 31, 2012).  http://www.spiritualawakeningprocess.com

General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. Sabbath School & Personal Ministries. (2014).  http://www.sabbathschoolpersonalministries.org

Respect for different types of spirituality.  (2014). https://au.reachout.com

Spiritual Lessons from Life's Experiences.  (2014). http://www.yukonweb.com

John Ortberg . An Ordinary Day with Jesus: Experiencing the Reality of God in your Everyday Life. Spiritual Pathways we connect to God. (2014).http://ariseonline.org