Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education / Edition 1

by Arthur W. Chickering, Jon C. Dalton, Liesa Stamm

Overview

This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive resource that addresses the growing movement for incorporating spirituality as an important aspect of the meaning and purpose of higher education. Written by Arthur W. Chickering, Jon C. Dalton, and Leisa Stamm—experts in the field of educational leadership and policy—Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education shows how to encourage increased authenticity and spiritual growth among students and education professionals by offering alternative ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education includes a rich array of examples to guide the integration of authenticity and spirituality in curriculum, student affairs, community partnerships, assessment, and policy issues. Many of these illustrative examples represent specific policies and programs that have successfully been put in place at diverse institutions across the country. In addition, the authors cover the theoretical, historical, and social perspectives on religion and higher education and examine the implications for practice. They include the results of recent court cases that deal with church-state issues and offer recommendations that pose no legal barrier to implementation.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780787974435
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	10/24/2005
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.28(w) x 9.27(h) x 1.29(d)

About the Author

THE AUTHORS

Arthur W. Chickering is special assistant to the president of Goddard College. He is the author and coauthor of several books, including the Jossey-Bass best-selling classic, Education and Identity, now in its second edition.

Jon C. Dalton is associate professor in educational leadership and policy studies at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Liesa Stamm is a senior associate at Rutgers University Center for Children and Childhood Studies. She serves as a research and planning consultant for projects in Camden, New Jersey and for international service learning.

Read an Excerpt

Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education

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By Arthur W. Chickering

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-7879-7443-9

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Chapter One

Our Orientation

Arthur W. Chickering

"The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: "I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' 'Don't you think God knows the facts?' Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but he does not know this version of the facts'" (Baeyer, 1992, p. 9). Szilard's orientation is similar to ours in writing this book. There are many perspectives on authenticity and spirituality. Moral development and character development were key purposes for our early colleges. There is substantial research and theory concerning the development of identity and integrity, of purpose and meaning. Authenticity and spiritual growth interact with and in many ways encompass these other conceptual orientations. And there are many perspectives concerning whether higher education should help students address such issues and, if so, how. We don't pretend to have the "truth" about this complex area, but we do have our own "version" concerning these issues and what needs to be done.

This work grows out of our shared concern about the limits of the heavy emphasis higher education places on rational empiricism and its increasingly narrow focus on professional and occupational training. This combination has led to growing neglect of larger human and societal issues concerning authenticity, spiritual growth, identity and integrity, purpose and meaning. We aim to help create a better balance by proposing a wide range of policies and practices that address these aspects of human development, that will strengthen authenticity and spiritual growth-for our students, for us as professionals, for our institutions, and for the larger society we want to serve.

This chapter opens with our definitions of spirituality and authenticity and then turns to issues of values and indoctrination, our "bedrock orientation," and personal statements. We close with why we think that higher education must move in this direction. We believe the needs are great and that getting started expeditiously is critical.

THE LANGUAGE CHALLENGE

When we gather with colleagues to discuss "spirituality in higher education"-a problematic, many-faceted arena-we find ourselves using diverse terms that vary depending on our personal and professional backgrounds. Persons anchored in various religious traditions and from faith-based institutions are typically accustomed to, and comfortable with, the language of spirituality. But for others, that language carries baggage from the worlds of established religions and churches with which they do not identify. They do not want be understood to endorse anything that hints at proselytizing or indoctrination. Atheists, agnostics, and persons with strong humanistic orientations find that words like authenticity, purpose, meaning, integrity, wisdom, and values express their concerns. For these persons character development and moral development are legitimate concerns for higher education, but "spiritual growth" raises red flags. Nevertheless, when we have been in half-day and weekend workshops with 40 to 150 persons whose backgrounds span the world religions and every shade of humanist, and whose institutional affiliations are similarly diverse, we rapidly move beyond the language challenge. We quickly find that we share very similar hearts and desires, disaffections and dismay, at the social and institutional conditions that characterize most of our communities and institutions. We find that we yearn for safe spaces and for colleagues with whom we can discuss these concerns. In creating these safe spaces we need to recognize and respect the different conceptual orientations and linguistic differences among our colleagues. We believe that two- and four-year colleges and universities need to legitimize and value such conversations and to create changes that do the same for our students.

For the purposes of this book, we need a shared definition of spirituality. The one we have adopted (Teasdale, 1999) opens with what for us is an important distinction and goes on to language with which we three identify:

Being religious connotes belonging to and practicing a religious tradition. Being spiritual suggests a personal commitment to a process of inner development that engages us in our totality. Religion, of course, is one way many people are spiritual. Often, when authentic faith embodies an individual's spirituality the religious and the spiritual will coincide. Still, not every religious person is spiritual (although they ought to be) and not every spiritual person is religious. Spirituality is a way of life that affects and includes every moment of existence. It is at once a contemplative attitude, a disposition to a life of depth, and the search for ultimate meaning, direction, and belonging. The spiritual person is committed to growth as an essential ongoing life goal. To be spiritual requires us to stand on our own two feet while being nurtured and supported by our tradition, if we are fortunate enough to have one [pp. 17-18].

Karen Armstrong's way of thinking about religion and spirituality also resonates with us:

Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice. The myths of the hero, for example, are not meant to give us historical information about Prometheus or Achilles-or for that matter, about Jesus or the Buddha. Their purpose is to compel us to act in such a way that we bring out our own heroic potential.

In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering "the truth" or "the meaning of life" but about living as intensely as possible in the here and now. The idea is not to latch on to some superhuman personality or to "get to heaven" but to discover how to be fully human-hence the images of the perfect or enlightened man, or the deified human being. Archetypal figures such as Muhammad, the Buddha, and Jesus become icons of fulfilled humanity. God or Nirvana is not an optional extra, tacked on to our human nature. Men and women have a potential for the divine, and are not complete unless they realize it within themselves [2004, pp. 270, 271].

Those are the ways we define and think about spirituality and religion. Please note that this definition includes atheists. Many atheists, though not religious, share "a contemplative attitude, a disposition to a life of depth, and the search for ultimate meaning, direction, and belonging" and are committed to growth. Many atheists are trying to discover how to be fully human. Estimated at about 5-10 percent of the population, they need to be respected by, and included in, our varied efforts.

Authenticity seems to be a more straightforward and less loaded term. Being authentic means that what you see is what you get. What I believe, what I say, and what I do are consistent. Of course creating that consistency is a lifelong challenge as we encounter new experiences, new persons and new information. As we mature and move to new levels of cognitive and affective complexity, deconstruction and reconstruction must occur.

We must recognize that we usually assume that authenticity carries a positive value, that authentic persons are good, honest, trustworthy, and so forth. But that need not always be the case. History tells us of individuals who were authentically evil. Their words and deeds had a high degree of internal consistency used for selfish and malevolent ends. Also there are historical precedents for authenticity-strong consistency among words and deeds-driven by religious beliefs. Today's suicide bombers are a case in point. But we strive for an authenticity that is kind, caring, and socially responsible.

We can put flesh and blood on these abstract definitions and illustrate the kind of authenticity we espouse by recalling some exemplars. Some who come to mind for me are Mahatma Ghandi, George Fox, Barbara Jordan, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Sojourner Truth, and Desmond Tutu. Each of us has his or her list. These internationally recognized exemplars set a high standard. But there are many others, closer to home and not widely known, who in less dramatic ways live up to the values we espouse. In totally unbiased fashion, I would include my mother, my wife, my son and three daughters, and my two colleagues who are the coauthors of this book. There are local friends and good neighbors, community leaders, and socially responsible citizens who display the qualities of those well-recognized exemplars in their daily lives. Each reader probably knows similar individuals, so this kind of personal development is not beyond our reach.

These definitions of spirituality and authenticity imply that these domains intimately interact with other major vectors of human development: integrity, identity, autonomy and interdependence, meaning and purpose. Striving for integrity-for a life where word and deed, word and word, deed and deed are consistent with a personally owned value structure, over time and across varied contexts-is critical for spiritual integrity and growth. "Stand[ing] on our own two feet while being nurtured and supported by our tradition" calls for a significant level of autonomy even as we recognize our necessary dependence on family and friends as well as on our local, national, and global communities. And it requires that we recognize the importance of our own support and contributions to those personal, institutional, and political entities that depend on us. Our character and our purposes configure our lives. Our interdependencies depend on our capacity to identify with something larger than our own self-interest. Ultimately, it is our character, our purposes, and the values inherent in the way we live these out in our daily lives that express our spirituality as "a way of life that affects and includes every moment of existence." Therefore, when we talk about encouraging authenticity and spirituality in higher education and the changes called for in our institutions and in ourselves, we are talking about all these major dimensions of human development.

VALUES AND INDOCTRINATION

Higher education is not value free. Each policy and practice we adopt, each resource allocation judgment or staffing and personnel decision we make expresses a value priority. The gap between our espoused values and the values actually in use is often large, unrecognized, and unarticulated. Stephen Glazer (1999) addresses one of these gaps:

A great irony is that while spiritual indoctrination, in particular, has been banned from our classroom, indoctrination and imposition continue unimpeded. Students aren't indoctrinated into religious liturgy but instead into dualism, scientism, and most especially consumerism. We have been indoctrinated into a severely limited, materialistically biased world view.

Rather than learning to nurture and preserve spirit, we learn to manipulate the world: to earn, store, and protect wealth. Rather than learning to be sensitive-understand and attend to the needs of others-we learn to want, rationalize, and do for ourselves. With the rise of a kind of "economic individualism" as our basic sense of identity has come the centralization of wealth and power, the loss of the commons, and the ravishing of the planet. The fact is, within our schools and culture, identity is being imposed: not spiritual identity but material identity [pp. 79, 80].

Like most of our colleagues in higher education, we certainly do not approve of indoctrination of any kind. Yet wittingly and unwittingly, we and our institutions do indeed indoctrinate. We believe we must become aware of the subtle, and not so subtle, kinds of indoctrination expressed through our daily practices, and address those institutionally and in our own professional lives.

OUR BEDROCK ORIENTATION

Our approach to strengthening authenticity and spirituality in higher education is rooted neither in a church nor religious orientation, nor in the state nor in politics. We believe we need to move from the inside to the outside, to work out from the core of our experiences. Kant said that logical concepts are abstracted from empirical experiences. The language of science is our most precise way of communicating meaningfully about facts. But because it is based on observing external facts, the language of science and logic does not cope well with our inner experiences. It follows that the most central tenet of our orientation toward strengthening authenticity and spirituality in higher education is that each and every one of us must be as candid and open as we can about our own orientations, motives, prides, and prejudices. We also recognize that we are all possessed by our own "mental models." We recognize that our biases compromise our "objectivity." Our beliefs and behaviors are rooted in our prior experiences and preconceptions. And of all the areas for potential sharing, self-descriptions and self-attributions are most subject to bias. We all-the "good" and the "bad," the "evil" and the "righteous," of whatever political or religious persuasion-create personal systems of self-concepts and beliefs we live by, stories that explain ourselves to ourselves and make sense, to us at least, of our checkered existence. The secret to a satisfying existence-remaining open to new experiences, saying yes to life-is to recognize and accept those formulations and live them as best we can. Unfortunately, it is also true, as we have learned recently to our sorrow, that people defend nothing more violently and fanatically than the preconceptions they live by. But given all this, we believe that the path to hope and reconciliation, to strengthened authenticity and spirituality, lies in sharing those preconceptions, exposing our assumptions and preconceptions, and risking the vulnerability entailed.

That is what is required for significant amplification of higher education.

We higher education professionals need to be knowledgeable about-and to appreciate-our religious and spiritual historical antecedents and social perspectives. We need to create new curricular content and to become competent with a wide range of pedagogical strategies. We need to introduce new experiences for students through creative student affairs programming accompanied by powerful partnerships, all of which are well integrated with courses and classes. We need to be aware of various strategies for intervention. Leadership, not only "at the top" but throughout the organization, is critical. But these leaders will need courageous followers who ask tough questions, who address gaps between "espoused values" and "values in use," who challenge policies and practices that run counter to realizing a shared vision. Finally, of course, hard-nosed evaluation, formative more than summative, is necessary, as we try to create an integrated complex of college and university policies, practices, and cultures that helps us balance our considerable talents for rational analysis and scientific research with similar competence and effectiveness concerning authenticity and spiritual growth.

But all the structural changes, all the creative, adventurous innovations, will only scratch the surface unless each of us professionals can be authentic ourselves. Each of us needs to be as forthcoming as possible about our own passions and prejudices. We need to declare why we believe being authentic is critical not only for higher education but for the United States, where we are struggling to sustain, if not to create, a multicultural, civil democracy in the face of terrorist threats and growing gaps between the haves and have-nots, at home and abroad.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Foreword vii
Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin

Preface xiii

The Authors xvii

Part One: Framing Perspectives 1

1 Our Orientation 5
Arthur W. Chickering

2 The Dynamics of Spirituality and the Religious Experience 37
Liesa Stamm

3 The Influence of Religion and Spirituality in Shaping American Higher Education 66
Liesa Stamm

Part Two: Institutional Amplification 93

4 Policy Issues: Legislative and Institutional 97
Arthur W. Chickering

5 Curricular Content and Powerful Pedagogy 113
Arthur W. Chickering

6 The Place of Spirituality in the Mission and Work of College Student Affairs 145
Jon C. Dalton

7 Integrating Spirit and Community in Higher Education 165
Jon C. Dalton

Part Three: Getting There from Here 187

8 Planned Change and Professional Development 189
Arthur W. Chickering

9 Assessing Ineffable Outcomes 220
Arthur W. Chickering, with Marcia Mentkowski

10 Leadership for Recovering Spirit 243
Liesa Stamm

11 Principles and Practices for Strengthening Moral and Spiritual Growth in College 272
Jon C. Dalton

Appendix A: University of Missouri-Columbia Policy Statement 283

Appendix B: Illustrative Course Syllabi 294

Appendix C:Rutgers Evaluation and Dissemination Plans 310

Appendix D: Teacher Formation Evaluation Results 316

Appendix E: Inventory for Assessing the Moral and Spiritual Growth Initiatives of Colleges and Universities 318
Jon C. Dalton

References 331

Name Index 345

Subject Index 351