Attending to Spiritual Dimensions in Stories: The Imperative of Thinking Wholistically

Abstract

Our contribution to ISATT's 40th Anniversary Yearbook focusing on Studying Teaching and Teacher Education grows out of our experiences across time in diverse Lands/Place, situations, and relationships. The knowledge we center have grown through relationships and experiences of great violence and harm alongside experiences and relationships where we have experienced abiding commitments to wholeness and healing. Our individual and collective attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions in the stories we live, tell, retell, and relive about striving to live in good ways, in ethically relational ways, has connected us over time. Living alongside and thinking with one another has shaped our movements beyond the colonial and human-centric understandings of stories of/as experience and thinking with stories that often dominate in (research for) teacher education and development. Attending the spiritual dimensions of stories of experience expands the educative potential of thinking with stories. As humans who are composing lives as educators on Indigenous lands where the colonial project continues to be genocidal for Indigenous peoples and Lands/Place, attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions of experience feels imperative if the next generations of children and youth in schools, and adults in teacher education and development, are to experience these places as educative and non-violent, and as opening potential to interrupt the pervasive colonial narratives that continue to dominate.

Citation

Steinhauer, P., Cardinal, T., Saleh, M., Stavrou, S., Driedger-Enns, L., Murphy, S. and Huber, J. (2023), "Attending to Spiritual Dimensions in Stories: The Imperative of Thinking Wholistically", Craig, C.J., Mena, J. and Kane, R.G. (Ed.) Studying Teaching and Teacher Education (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 44), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 111-125. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720230000044014