|
 |
 |
|
 |
 CURRENT ISSUE
Letter from the EditorDear Colleagues, As we welcome the start to another academic year, it is important to refocus our attention on meaningful ways to serve our students best in order to foster their spiritual development while on campus. This edition of the Newsletter highlights how Student Affairs practitioners and educators can engage in significant work, along with other members of our campus communities, to support our students' spiritual growth in new and encouraging ways. While we have previously highlighted specific pedagogy and practices to incorporate spirituality in the classroom, we want to also focus on co-curricular ways to cultivate spirituality on campus through collaborative practices between Student Affairs Departments and Divisions as well as partnerships with Academic Affairs. To frame this edition, long-time educator and author Carney Strange shares ways Student Affairs can support students' spiritual development in an engaging interview narrative. Through focusing on creating and sustaining mentoring communities, Strange presents a perspective on how to use spiritual questions to stimulate big questions students are struggling with and create safe spaces for open dialogue. Additionally, Professor Jane Fried upholds that the integration of living and learning will help to promote wholeness within our institutions. In her article, Fried presents ideas for intentionally connecting the work of Academic Affairs with the work of Student Affairs to enhance students' spiritual exploration and development while in college. Mary Klink, Director of College Ministries at Edgewood College, also details a spiritual intervention model to involve the entire Student Affairs Division in this important work. Through a series of developmental retreats and in-services, Edgewood staff created a Vision and Values statement in order to encourage spiritual development throughout the campus and designed related guides for encouraging spiritual exploration. To add a student voice to this edition, recent graduate Cecilia Macias details how specific involvement experiences in college allowed her to broaden her view of spirituality and diversity while on campus. Through the support of Student Affairs educators and practitioners, Macias highlights significant developmental moments and experiences that have inspired her to pursue Student Affairs professionally in order to continue this important work for future generations of students. The theme of this issue also connects with the work our project has been doing to highlight Promising Practices for incorporating spirituality in the curriculum and co-curriculum. We are continuing to collect your best practices and welcome additional submissions. Please email all submissions to spirit@gseis.ucla.edu and attach a completed submission form. We look forward to hearing about the courses, programs, and other initiatives that you have developed! Please feel free to contact me at spiritualitynewsletter@gseis.ucla.edu if you have any comments about this edition or suggestions for future Newsletter topics. Thank you for your continued readership and we look forward to hearing from you soon! Leslie M. Schwartz
Creating Communities to Encourage Engagement and Spiritual Questions: An Interview with Carney Strange
In this interview, educator and author Carney Strange shares his background as it relates to becoming engaged in working to support students' exploration of spirituality in college through creating mentoring communities. Strange upholds that Student Affairs practitioners and educators, along with the entire campus community, must be actively engaged in promoting literacy around how to recognize and respond to spiritual questions in our own life and the lives of others. This is a major challenge and a greater opportunity that currently exists within the landscape of higher education.
Living and learning cannot be separated from each other, yet our institutional structures and pedagogical approaches often encourage their division. Professor Fried presents a narrative on the integration of living and learning to draw connections between the work of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs. She argues that when learning involves thinking, feeling, and making meaningful connections between knowledge and life, a campus can become truly integrated. In this way, learning takes on a spiritual dimension if students experience the wholeness of their own experience as they learn.
This article describes the year-long process designed by Edgewood's Student Development Division staff to create, claim, and implement a vision for promoting students' spiritual development during their time on campus. Through creating a campus Vision and Values Statement for Encouraging Student Spiritual Development and structuring intentional training and development sessions, Edgewood's work serves as a model for introducing spirituality on an administrative level within Student Affairs. Exercises and strategies used in this process provide resources for other institutions that seek to integrate opportunities for spiritual development within holistic services and programming.
Read More |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
