Apart from a few general statements asserting the connection between the specific learning areas and personal identity, spiritual understandings, and personal values, the relationship between students' learning in the respective curriculums and developing their spiritual well-being is unspoken and implied in the curriculum documents.
Teachers would recognise the objectives for values and developing personal identity and self-worth as contributing to development of students' spiritual well-being, only to the extent that the curriculum statements are understood and utilised as an integrated whole. It is as though the curriculum writers, in the face of pressure to include something inherently controversial in the curriculum, have found the courage to
mandate teachers to address it, but not the courage to go as far as to advise how to do it.
The literature suggests that, as a representation of spirituality, the three-aspect taxonomy offered by the Health and Physical Education statement is not comprehensive. A teacher wanting to do the curriculum documents' bidding and attend to students' spiritual well-being, will likely be faced with a barrage of questions, even after reflection on the occurrence of the aspects within the curriculum documents:
"What is ' spiritual well-being'? How do I promote it in/to the students in my class? How do I know when the students are experiencing it? Is it something I can assess and measure in the students, and judge whether or not they have achieved it? Are there behavioural indicators of a 'spiritually healthy' child and, if so, what are they? How do I j udge whether or not my actioned curriculum is underpinned by regard for the students' spiritual well-being?"
Box 2.1 : Questions facing a teacher wanting to attend to students' spiritual well-being
How do I know when the students are experiencing spiritual well- being? behavioural indicators of a ' spiritually healthy' child and,
if so, what are they?
How do I judge whether or not my actioned curriculum
is underpinned by regard for the students' well being?
0
0
00
0
0 What is 'spiritual well-being'? I s spiritual well being something Ican assess and measure in the students, and judge whether or not they have achieved it?
How do I promote spiritual well being in/to the students in my
class?
' Well-being' implies a notion of health, i.e., that there is a desirable condition of spiritual wellness towards which teachers are aiming. There are no indications within the New Zealand national curriculum documents of what the aspects of spiritual well being (recognised by the curriculum writers) look like in a spiritually well person. They give no indication of how 'personal identity' , ' self-awareness' and 'the values and
beliefs that determine the way people live' contribute to spiritual wel lness. Similarly,
readers of the curriculum may be left wondering what attributes of one's 'search for meaning and purpose in life' indicate spiritual wellness. Without a definition or an explanation of the meaning of spiritual well-being, it may be difficult for teachers to Doctoral Thesis Chapter 2 The Research Context Page 29 Deborah Ayres
judge whether or not their students are expenencmg it as the curriculum designers intended.
In order to develop a better understanding of what it means to be 'spiritually healthy', one could project commonly understood concepts of 'health' onto one's understandings of spirituality. Such an exercise raises thought-provoking questions.
• Health implies an absence of illness, i.e., that one is not sick. Question: What is
spiritual il lness?
• Health implies fitness. Question: What does it mean to be spiritually fit?
Fitness suggests, among other things:
stamina; Question: What does spiritual stamina look like?
fast recovery rate; Question: What constitutes a fast spiritual recovery rate?
strength. Question: What does it mean to be spiritually strong?
One can be fit for different kinds of physical activity. Question: Does this imply a fitness for different aspects of spirituality?
• Health implies emotional buoyancy, i.e., that one is free from mental disease that
controls the emotions. Question: What constitutes spiritual buoyancy? What form does spiritual disease take?
• Health implies that one is well nourished, i.e., that one is subject to a healthy
diet. Question: What constitutes a healthy spiritual 'diet'? What are the characteristics of a person who is spiritually well nourished?
The answers to the questions and others like them will always be personally constructed, depending on personal beliefs and understandings of spirituality, and on personal ontologies and experiences. It remains for governments wishing to mandate tending to spiritual well-being in state education to come up with a multi-dimensional characterisation of spirituality that is acceptable to all whom the schools serve.
That the answers to the questions 111 Box 2. 1 above are not addressed in the New Zealand curriculum documents is hardly surprising, because the questions point to perennial issues that characterise both historical and contemporary debates about
spirituality, debates that encircle and trouble the meaning of spirituality and its rightful place in education.
Post-modem research is beginning to inform the debates but it appears that inclusion of spirituality in the New Zealand school curriculum is not based on research evidence. Lack of a research foundation is symptomatic of being a new and undeveloped domain in the curriculum; common understandings and a common language with which to share understandings are yet to emerge.
There is no evidence in the curriculum documents, that the curriculum writers have considered the possible special nature of children 's spirituality. Some contemporary researchers are working on credible answers to the teachers' questions (see Box 2. 1 ) by studying people's experiences using methods that honour children's voices, e.g., Children's Spirituality Project (Hay with Nye, 1 998) and Children and Worldviews Project (Erricker, Erricker, Ota, Sullivan, & Fletcher, 1 997). Research-based answers to the questions have the best chance of providing New Zealand teachers with a reference point from where to start considering what the curriculum mandate means for their teaching practice.
The doctoral research aims to contribute to the discourse. As with any people-oriented research dealing with the non-physical world of experience, the thesis is built on a foundation of the researcher's ontological and epistemological assumptions. Chapter 3 develops the researcher's assumptions into a framework of conceptual understandings about spirituality and spiritual growth. The conceptual framework clearly points to a role for the teacher in students' spiritual development.
Chapter 3 Spiritual ity and Teaching
Understanding i s a human activity. Our trying t o understand spirituality is a struggle because we are trying to understand with our human brain something that is so much more than we can ever experience as a human being.
Entry in the researcher's journal, 1 8 July 2002
3.1 The transcendent nature of spi rituality
The doctoral research is conducted from an ontological perspective that embraces the possibility that spirituality and the spiritual realm exists beyond human response and understanding. It runs counter to the tendency in many academic circles in the last century or two, which has been towards a humanistic treatment of 'spirituality' that defines spirituality in terms of human psychological phenomena like perception, cognition and consciousness. For example, "Bucke ( 1 923) refers to spirituality as 'cosmic consciousness'; Maslow ( 1 970) called it 'being-cognition' ; Ouspensky ( 1 934) called it 'the perception of the miraculous"' (Kirkland in Best, 1 996:26 1 ).
Humanists confine reality to a closed system (Doll, 1 993) defined by the boundaries of the physical universe, i.e., space and time. While humanist interpretations have yielded some useful understandings of human's experience of spirituality, to defme spirituality in terms of human existence in space and time, to pin the label of 'spirituality' in a humanistic fashion to psychological patterns detected in humanity, like searching for purpose and meaning in life, or contemplating the mysterious, seems to miss the essential point. Why call it 'spirituality' if it is already known as these other things?
In the thesis, spirituality is about the spirit, or soul, which is the part of a human's existence that transcends human life, time and the physical world. The boundaries of reality are thus different from those understood in humanist interpretations. Reality is understood as an open system (Doll, 1 993) that extends infmitely in an infmite number of directions.
The affective education movement has provided a medium for growing understandings of transcendence. John Miller, from the affective education movement, presents a