| dc.description.abstract | There has been a dramatic rise in interest in spirituality over the last decade.
Historically, universities began with a spiritual base. Today, superficially, education
generally appears to have lost its spiritual emphasis. The purpose of this study is to
describe spirituality in Canadian post-secondary education by investigating the work
experiences of 6 professors across 5 different faculties at one university in Ontario.
The intent is to determine the extent of spirituality in these professors’ teaching and to
find out how the professors defined spirituality, and what their viewpoints were with
regard to the barriers and supports to spirituality in education.
This study utilized a mainly phenomenological approach to investigate
spirituality in education. Six participants were chosen and interviewed through a
snowball sampling technique. All of them are male university professors between the
ages of 31 and 60 who come from three religious backgrounds.
Generally following guidelines from Bogdan and Biklen (2003), four themes
emerged from the analysis of the interview data: (a) subjects’ definitions of
spirituality, (b) their perceptions of barriers and supports, (c) benefits, and (d)
application. Through an exploration of the work experience of spirituality in
education, the lived experiences of the researcher and her participants were described
in order to answer the research questions.
The findings from this study could provide educators with first hand accounts
o f how spirituality has been incorporated into the classroom environment within one
Canadian university which could be used as an example to gauge the current situation
o f spirituality education in post-secondary institutions. This study also has the
potential to raise awareness regarding the lack of spirituality in education, and will add to the body of knowledge on spirituality in education, which in turn could
motivate others to investigate the topic further. | |
