Spirituality in Higher Education: Autoethnographies (review)

At the heart of Spirituality in Higher Education lies the editors’ desire to provide meaningful examples of the qualitative research method known as autoethnography and to encourage readers to explore spirituality in the academy through this process.

Addressed to higher education faculty, the book’s three primary sections each relate the issue of spirituality to an aspect of faculty life. Part 1 discusses the integration of spirituality into one’s personhood. Part 2 explores the struggle to integrate spirituality into such instructional activities as curriculum development, teaching method, and learning assessment. Part 3 addresses the intersection of spirituality with other faculty responsibilities such as the scholarship of discovery (research) and the scholarship of service (community).

Editor Heewon Chang begins the book by establishing autoethnography as a method of spirituality research. Qualitative, self-focused, and context-conscious, autoethnography encourages one to reflect spiritually. Chang affirms the approach as well suited for understanding the highly subjective nature of spirituality and how to connect issues of personal meaning, purpose, and value to the individual’s context-specific professional settings.

The authors in Part 1 report how their personal pursuit of spirituality has affected their achievement of a sense of being. In Chapter 2, Sally Galman reflects on the multiple identities that she experiences in her life (her various “hats”) and how they simultaneously converge. She points out that one must resist the temptation to create hierarchies of roles. The key to equanimity is not in striking a balance among these roles, but rather in living them out in an integrative manner—for example, by articulating a common goal that creates shared meaning and purpose. In this way, Galman describes her pursuit of spirituality as a pursuit to uncover the transformative connections by which the roles in her life combine.

Mary Poplin, in Chapter 3, unfolds her personal story that culminates in a defense for the need to incorporate spirituality into academia and to resist the apparent “secular imperative.” As she explains her own journey of self-discovery, she specifically pinpoints the transformative power of forgiveness. Her worldview greatly expanded as she considered how her personal transformation would integrate with her role as a faculty member. Poplin suggests that, without a spiritual framework by which to discern truth from misinformation, the pursuit of knowledge becomes disconnected and ultimately lacks perspective.

Ruth Anna Abigail, in Chapter 4 evaluates her spiritual identity in the context of a faith-based institution. She reflects on her spiritual journey of trying to become an “insider” at her institution and how, through opportunity and personal pain, she makes the discovery that there is no “inside.”

By accepting this idea, she discovers the imperative to press forward and connect with others rather than to rest safely in the recesses of the mythical “inside.” She suggests that willingly donning the role of an “outsider” not only heightened her awareness of the undercurrents in her own life, but also increased her perspective of those within her context.

Chapter 5 concludes the discussion of person-hood with a description of how six colleagues— Eileen O’Shea, Roben Torosyan, Tracey Robert, Ingeborg Haug, Maggie Wills, and Betsy Bowen— created a small professional community dedicated to the development of spiritual practices in higher education. Each contributes a unique perspective of spirituality as it plays out within her respective discipline, yet all resonate with similar themes that highlight the personally transformative value of connecting with others. These themes echo those reflected in the previous chapters.

Part 2, focusing on the teaching component of the faculty life, considers how to impart spirituality in the classroom. Robert J. Nash and Monique Swaby, in Chapter 6, emphasize the need to establish a place in college curricula for the inward journey of spirituality.

Even though the two authors have different religious beliefs, both champion the need for students to explore a personal spirituality of meaning. They suggest issues such as service to others, forgiveness, and peaceful living with diversity as topics that may...