Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Without Using the “S” Word 419
psychometrics, the attention to gender and culture has lagged somewhat behind other areas of
psychology and education, although clearly there is more of a concern with power relations based
on gender, race, class, and culture now than ever before, even in educational psychology.
Obviously the discourses in education that focus on dealing with gender, race, class, and
sexual orientation have a great interest in the cultural context in education; indeed that is their
purpose. But like the field of educational psychology, these discourses focused on power relations
and how to alter them, and have mostly ignored the role of spirituality in the ongoing development
of identity and in culturally responsive education. There is, however, a growing body of literature in
education that talks about the role of spirituality and learning (Astin, 2004; Glazer, 1999; Palmer,
1998; Parks, 2000). Most of this literature, however, has not attended to how spirituality interconnects
with culture. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the role of spirituality
in culturally responsive teaching, and its potential role in challenging power relations, and what it
suggests for educational psychology. Much of this discussion is based on the results of qualitative
research study of how spirituality informs teaching to challenge power relations of a group of 31
educators of different cultural groups, as well as my own experience as a white woman teaching
in a graduate-level higher education setting of how to do it. The discussion of the study itself here
is necessarily brief, but I have discussed the role of spirituality in culturally responsive teaching
in depth elsewhere (see Tisdell, 2003). But before this discussion goes any further, it’s important
to consider what is meant by spirituality and how does it connect to culture.
DEFINING SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CONNECTION TO CULTURE
Most often in discussions of spirituality, it is argued that spirituality is about meaning making, a
belief in a higher power, or higher purpose, the wholeness and the interconnectedness of all things,
and that it is different from religion, although for many people it’s interrelated. Many people also
discuss it as related to developing a sense of greater authenticity. Indeed, most authors agree that
this is some of what spirituality is about. But faith development theorist James Fowler (1981)
notes that spirituality is also about how people construct knowledge through image, symbol, and
unconscious processes. While Fowler has not discussed the connection of spirituality to culture,
obviously image, symbol, and unconscious processes are often deeply cultural, and thus deeply
connected to cultural identity.
As noted earlier, in most of the education and psychology literature, discussions of spirituality
are focused more on an individual level—on what meaning individuals make of spirituality and
spiritual experience, with little attention to the role of culture in the expression or understanding
of spirituality. Some authors do, however, more explicitly discuss spirituality as a fundamental
aspect of their being rooted in their cultural experience. To a large extent, these contributions and
discussions have been made by people of color or those who are explicitly interested in cultural
issues. Indeed, as hooks (2000) suggests, these authors are a part of the counterculture that are
trying to “break mainstream cultural taboos that silence or erase our passion for spiritual practice”
(p. 82) and the spiritual underpinning to cultural work.
In order to consider further how spirituality relates to culture, and to culturally responsive
teaching, it is important to consider the phenomenon of developing and sustaining a positive
cultural identity. Again the field of educational psychology has tended to ignore the process of
cultural identity development, largely because its traditional focus has been on measurement,
and of isolating and measuring a particular variable, usually devoid of the multiple cultural
effects that shape an individual’s identity. But in order to attend to culturally responsive teaching,
it is important to understand the dynamics of cultural identity development. Those who have
discussed race and ethnic identity models of development have built on the pioneering work of
William Cross (1971), who initially posed a five-stage model of racial identity. According to