Abstract
This chapter discusses the place of spirituality and spiritual learning in the promotion of transformative education. In highlighting the importance of taking spirituality seriously in the politics and ontology of educational transformation, I locate my discursive framework in the discussion in the challenges of critical teaching to a diverse school audience in North American contexts. I bring an anticolonial reading to what it means to engage spirituality in the political project of transformative learning. My understanding of transformative learning is that education should be able to resist oppression and domination by strengthening the individual self and the collective souls to deal with the continued reproduction of colonial and recolonial relations in the academy. It also must assist the learner to deal with pervasive effects of imperial structures of the academy on the processes of knowledge production and validation; the understanding of indigenity; and the pursuit of agency, resistance, and politics for educational change. Dei, Hall and Goldin-Rosen-berg (2000) have argued for working with “Indigenous knowledge” as a strategic knowledge base from which to rupture our academies (schools, colleges, and universities). In this discursive politics, the notion of Indigenous is understood as the absence of colonial imposition of the knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society. Such knowledge reflects the commonsense ideas and cultural resource knowledges of local peoples concerning everyday realities of living. It is knowledge referring to those whose authority resides in origin, place, history, and ancestry. (See also Dei, 2000.)
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© 2002 Edmund O’Sullivan, Amish Morrell, and Mary Ann O’Connor
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Sefa Dei, G.J. (2002). Spiritual Knowing and Transformative Learning. In: O’Sullivan, E., Morrell, A., O’Connor, M.A. (eds) Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-63550-4_10
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