The integration of faith and learning (IFL) is an integral part of Christian higher education. The recent years have seen a spate in published studies testifying to an intense pursuit of meaningful IFL by many institutions of Christian higher education. However, little scholarship has been devoted to explore the influence of faith integration in…

We analyzed 2,621 written student comments to better understand themes which most contribute to religion classes being rated high or low in terms of the spiritual benefit students received from the class. From 2,448 religion classes taught from September of 2010 through April of 2014, comments from the top 61 (2.5 percent) and bottom 51 (2.1…

Spirituality has been identified as an important component of democratic education by influential scholars such as Dewey, Freire, hooks, and Noddings. However, many teachers in the United States do not engage openly with a framework for understanding, organizing, and integrating pedagogical knowledge of spirituality within the context of…

This paper considers the role of spirituality in the practice of pastoral welfare and care in English state schools. Set against an educational landscape of increasingly aggressive neoliberal interests combined with growing public disquiet over the mental welfare of young people, the author examines how spirituality might in response contribute to…

In this article, the authors respond to emerging articulations of the work of a pedagogist or pedagogical facilitator in early childhood education in Canada. This article is grounded in two intentions: we (1) share the tentative pedagogical conversations that we have as pedagogists who centre particular concerns, interests, and accountabilities;…

The vast majority of young South African children grow up in socially- and economically-challenging settings. These impeding conditions hamper their intellectual growth and affect their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. Increasingly, mindfulness is being recognised as a means to enhance holistic well-being of children.…

This paper presents a critique of a set of teaching strategies known as "contemplative pedagogy." Using practices such as meditation, attentive listening, and reflective reading, contemplative inquiry focuses on direct first-person experience as an essential means of knowing that has historically been overshadowed and dismissed by an…

The exponential growth of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in recent years has resulted in a marketisation and commodification of practice--popularly labeled "McMindfulness"--which divorces mindfulness from its spiritual and ethical origins in Buddhist traditions. Such commodification is criticized by utilising ideas and insights…

Practices of spirituality, particularly amongst faculty who teach at faith-based institutions of higher education, are underexplored in the current body of literature. This qualitative study uses an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach to examine faculty members' attitudes about the role of spirituality in higher education and the…

Ongoing global issues relating to the decline of the popularity of institutional religions, the rise of numbers of non-religious persons, and new models of spirituality in superdiverse societies have resulted in the need to reconceptualise religious diversity as worldviews diversity, and to critically examine increasing calls for the provision of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore what is believed to be a deep connection between Islamic pedagogy as a way to cultivate personal learning experiences. The paper discusses the relationship between the characterising features of Islamic pedagogy and personalised learning that remains central to Islamic institutional developments.…

I consider in this paper the question of balance in popular education between what we can call annunciation and denunciation, inspired by the work of Paulo Freire. By annunciation, I mean the role of love, affirmation, encouragement and profound encounters with otherness; by denunciation, I have in mind the spirit of critique and challenge to the…

In "Democratic Foundations of Spiritually Responsive Pedagogy," Lingley worried that talk of spirituality is taboo in U.S. public school classrooms. Lingley pointed out that the dominant narrative demands silence on the topic. She wanted to make the case for spiritually responsive pedagogy as vital to an inclusive democracy. I begin this…

This article aims to better understand constraints (e.g., hostility toward spirituality) and opportunities that may affect teacher-student and student-student relations as spiritually informed ELT curriculum is negotiated. Viewed more broadly, spirituality aims to foster the ability to see one's own religious positioning in relation to other…

James Estep's integration of Vygotsky's work on the Zone of Proximal Development into Christian education and pedagogy falls short of a distinctly evangelical form of integration. Using Ken Badley's schemata of Integration of Faith and Learning, this article distinguishes Estep's "paradigmatic" integration from a more thoroughgoing…