Exploring Spirituality and Culture in Adult and Higher Education (review)

Ask college students the difference between religion and spirituality and they are likely to tell you that religion is about a lot of external rules and rituals while spirituality is a soul searching inward journey. Thus, it is not surprising that students' participation in formal religious activities usually declines in college while their interest in spirituality increases. Elizabeth Tisdell's new book, Exploring Spirituality and Culture in Adult and Higher Education, examines the soul-searching process of how spirituality intersects with students' learning and identity development. Tisdell argues persuasively that spirituality is a key to understanding how students make meaning and connect knowledge with deeper life purposes and values. Moreover, she explores a particular domain of spirituality that has received little attention in the recent literature which is the linkage between spirituality and culture. Tisdell addresses her book especially to educators who work in multicultural settings and are trying to deal with the complexities and dynamics created by cultural diversity.

The author makes a compelling argument for the neglect of spirituality in adult and higher education. She wants to "break the silence" of the lack of attention to spirituality and does this by showing how intrinsic spirituality is to the way students learn and make meaning and how central spirituality is to the backgrounds and experiences of most of today's diverse students. Tisdell argues that for education to be transformative in a pluralistic society it must engage students at several levels including the cognitive, affective, sociocultural and spiritual. My own experience in teaching and working with college students persuades me that Tisdell is right about this. Educational and student development efforts that ignore students' spirituality —that is, how they make internal connections to the defining beliefs and commitments in their lives—will inevitably be less effective since they do not reach that part of students' lives where things really matter. Paying attention to students' soul searching enables educators to make connections with students' real lives, their diverse origins, sacred memories and experiences, and the powerful ways that these connections are maintained and celebrated through ritual, ceremony, and mythology.

One of the great challenges of examining spirituality, particularly in the higher education setting, is clearly defining the territory. There is much skepticism about the empirical study of spirituality because definitions and descriptions are so diverse and imprecise. Tisdell recognizes the importance of this challenge and devotes an early chapter in her book to the task of defining spirituality. She offers seven basic assumptions about spirituality and elaborates on each of them. They include: the search for wholeness, meaning-making, moving to greater authenticity, the distinction between religion and spirituality, connection to peak experiences, presence in the learning environment, connection to symbols and ritual, and serendipity. Throughout her book Tisdell builds on these assumptions and seeks to provide concrete examples of how spirituality intersects with learning and development in higher education. Her basic assumptions are as good a summary of the main features of spirituality as I have seen and do provide a helpful platform for the arguments she proceeds to make about the lack of attention to spirituality and its importance in pedagogy and student development.

Yet even with her good effort to define spirituality it remains a slippery terrain. Tisdell describes spirituality as "transformation," "authenticity," "life force," "transcendence," "peak experience," and "surprise." She argues that spiritual experiences can be anything that conveys deep meaning and usually cannot be planned. She acknowledges that spiritual experiences are intensely personal and draw on image, symbol, and intuition. These features make the inner realm of spirituality inherently difficult to define and translate into educational theory and practice.

One of the ways the author makes her analysis more accessible and compelling is through the use of story telling. By using the personal accounts of real people she is able to give specific context and...