Spirituality, education, narraturgy : from wells of living, writing and reading
Date
2017-10-06
Authors
Scott, Daniel George
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Abstract
Philosophical work is a critical piece of the re-thinking necessary for opening spirituality to a consideration by educators particularly as it pertains to education. I approach spirituality in such a way that neither encases it in firm structures nor expects it to offer clear explanations. I am aware that such an engagement will seem difficult, even obscure, but insist that such re-thinking is necessary if we are to have a spirituality that is human (and humane), situated in life and situated in the process of life-long learning that includes the dynamics of learning-teaching as educational praxis.
This work of re-conceptualization is written in between spaces: between spirituality and education, between theory and narrative. It includes a personal struggle of be/com/ing spiritual presented biographically with tensions between thinking and practice, between knowing and living. There are a series of parallels, imaginaries of understanding: making a text, making a life, spirituality, reading, education, inquiry, flux.
The text also tells stories and uses stories to understand my personal and a more general (re-)conceptual journey connecting spirituality and education. This text offers narratives as vessels of spirit. Spirit moves in living as it moves in narratives. I offer a way of reading and understanding the work and working of narratives that I call narraturgy. It is a way to notice the spiritual as it works in stories, as it works on us and as we work on our living through stories. I see spirituality as a potential opportunity for education as a way of learning and teaching a radical hermeneutic sense of the possible, of the mysterious and of the flux.
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Keywords
Spirituality, Education