I relish the opportunity to have lived long enough in the academy to have seen the spiritual intent embedded within the voluminous commentaries of historians and sociologists of religions and the compendia of mytho-ethnographers--Panofsky, Eliade, Campbell come to mind--actually transformed into the life-breath of educators in the dailiness of our vocations. Elizabeth J. Tisdell's Exploring Spirituality and Culture in Adult and Higher Education takes its rightful place both at the table of conversation and within the arena of activity focused on culturally relevant education from the perspectives of spiritual formation, process, and content.
It is not always the easiest conversational ploy to address the elephant in the room, yet, as Tisdell notes for us, there has been increasing permission giving for doing just that--speaking directly to the issue of the simple fact of learners' and educators' impacted spiritual multi-dimensionalities and the intertwining of spirituality with meaning and meaning creation. I am of a generation which was alerted to the articulation of these concerns by exposure to Paulo Freire; Tisdell to a generation alerted more perhaps by bell hooks--both are cited, along with the growing numbers of qualitative researchers, activists, teachers and writers, as provocative commentators on, and advocates for, the enterprise of weaving spirituality into the classroom. Although I should immediately state, as does Tisdell, that the dynamics of spirituality pre-exist for our educational settings; it is not so much something we bring to the classroom and curricula, as it is something we acknowledge as there, and within which we can exercise a repertoire of sensitive pedagogy.
That Hegel is not mentioned until page 248 is an indication of how far the conversation has come; our beginning points, as Tisdell so wonderfully iterates, are within our immediate teaching experiences, and not within a deliberation of manifestations of spirit. Prior to teaching/learning moments themselves are those cultural experiences adults bring into the pattern of their lived lives marked as spiritual referents. Tisdell is very honest, I suggest, in paralleling her defining characteristics of spirituality with her own formative story.
Story, in fact, permeates this book, and is a necessary complement to the otherwise heady survey of the important literature in this area. While she does not always mix it well for this reader, I let go of my irritation when I recognized that Tisdell was either deliberately or unconsciously reflecting back to me the world in which we teaching academics live: we thrive on the moments, and are accountable for the monuments.
Exploring Spirituality and Culture is primarily concerned with, and drawn from, culturally relevant, transformative adult education and its attendant foci on equity in adult and higher education in regard to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and abledness. Classroom illustrations, research subjects, and supportive theoreticians are clustered around the considerable arena of discourse generated by teachers, administrators, activists and community organizers who have brought this awareness and deliberateness into academic design and intention. Tisdell's unique contribution to this vast array lies in her weaving together the distinctiveness of cultural formations, as affected by the very personal circumstances of the individual, and the commonly recognizable elements of spirituality. She immediately and helpfully provides her working frame of reference for spirituality, so that it does not slip away into the ethers so many of us fear it inhabits. She shows us a set of dynamics familiar to us, whether we've ever, as she lightly writes from time to time, "used the 's' word" or not. In sum, Tisdell makes these wise assumptions about spirituality: while interrelated for some, religion and spirituality are not the same; spirituality involves an honoring of the interconnectedness of all things; it is about the creation of meaning and movement toward greater authenticity; knowing in spirituality more often than not involves art, image, symbol, and ritual; spiritual experiences most often happen by surprise; and finally, a coda for the book itself, spirituality is always present in the learning environment, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Tisdell is the first to grant that there are some difficult and controversial coordinates on this map. What brightens this reader's journey with her through the territory is her fearless and consistent engagement with the material that runs counter to the heavy traditions of rationality in the dominant culture of the academy. Or perhaps I should say, the once dominant culture of the academy, as Tisdell's work is a reminder that whether we like it or not, the wheel has turned a bit in our academic settings, and we carry an accountability now for what adult learners have always known: learning is a matter of the heart and spirit as well as of the head.
What I especially cherish about her writing is that Tisdell demonstrates, even without trying, the applicability of her highly focused and contextualized work to where I find myself as an educator. Sometimes our most well intentioned mentors wind up only conversant with those already at the table; Tisdell takes the message and its embodiment in relevant learning design and creative possibility onto the street.
And finally, with all the "post-isms" tossing about today, Tisdell only moderately notes where she needs to do so, her place on the spectrum of scholarship. Rather than belaboring why she is where she is, she shows us how she and her collaborators have come to this place. She quietly goes about her work in this immediate, wounded world so freshly bent and wondered, with the joy and hope that pervades holistic learning and teaching. Little did the great encyclopedists of the human spirit know, or afford to imagine, that activist educators would recognize the content of the gathering as the process of the gathered. Tisdell is amongst those who have done so, and I, for one, am glad for that. Be patient with this book; it deserves your read.

Wayne A. Ewing
UNC Asheville