Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780820488790

Table of Contents

Reviews

'Spirituality, Ethnography, and Teaching: Stories from Within' is a timely and much needed anthology of autoethnographic stories that investigate how we as scholars and teachers negotiate spirit. Rather than confining spirituality to a single meaning, the authors demonstrate multiple conceptions and interpretations of spirit and how it is lived in daily lives and communicated in the classroom. They discuss and show the role of ritual and pilgrimage; calling, belief, and transformation; caring, love, and inspiration; dancing, music, and relationships; pain, loss, and death; mystery, dreaming, and sorcery; water, nature, and wilderness; Talmudic, Unitarian, Mormon, and evangelical understanding. The stories of these vulnerable writers encourage us to think about how we communicate spirit and give us courage to bring the deeper parts of ourselves, our hearts, bodies, and souls as well as our minds - into our teaching and writing lives. (Carolyn Ellis, Prof. of Communication and Sociology, University of South Florida)

« 'Spirituality, Ethnography, and Teaching: Stories from Within' is a timely and much needed anthology of autoethnographic stories that investigate how we as scholars and teachers negotiate spirit. Rather than confining spirituality to a single meaning, the authors demonstrate multiple conceptions and interpretations of spirit and how it is lived in daily lives and communicated in the classroom. They discuss and show the role of ritual and pilgrimage; calling, belief, and transformation; caring, love, and inspiration; dancing, music, and relationships; pain, loss, and death; mystery, dreaming, and sorcery; water, nature, and wilderness; Talmudic, Unitarian, Mormon, and evangelical understanding. The stories of these vulnerable writers encourage us to think about how we communicate spirit and give us courage to bring the deeper parts of ourselves, our hearts, bodies, and souls as well as our minds - into our teaching and writing lives. -- Carolyn Ellis

Author Information

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.

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