Ultimate Concern in Teachers' Lives and Practice: A Hermeneutic Inquiry

In this qualitative study I explore the experience of the infinite, eternal, and unconditional in the lives of six Western Canadian public high school teachers, investigating how their sense of what Paul Tillich calls “ultimacy” co-arises with their own particular deep personal interests or practices, and how such interests or practices reflect an ultimate concern in their work as teachers. Each teacher in this study was picked because they possessed some deeply held personal interest that lay outside of their teaching practice, though which also influences their practice in some way. Chapter One details the origins of my own ultimate concern and my passionate interest in the martial arts. I also outline the beginnings of a conceptual framework for thinking about the experience of ultimacy through teacher stories and hermeneutic inquiry. In Chapter Two, I proceed with a review of literature that focuses on key moments in the personal and professional lives of teachers, leading to personal transformation and spiritual insight. In Chapter Three, I introduce my research participants, how I selected them, my methods of data collection, and I elaborate on the philosophy and process of data interpretation in hermeneutics. Because one of the basic tenets of hermeneutic study is that it begins with being called or addressed, I argue that this approach meshes well with the experience of ultimacy, which arrives unannounced and leaves alluring traces that draw us. In this study, such traces are found in text that come from written or spoken teacher stories. The questions which provoked these stories follow William F. Pinar’s four moments of currere. In Chapter Four, I explore the origins of each of the six teachers’ sense of ultimacy and related future intentions, Pinar’s regressive and progressive moments. In Chapter Five, I detail my dialogue with teachers reflecting on the state of their passions or practices with which ultimacy co-arises, and discuss how present challenges prompt analysis, Pinar’s third moment. In Chapter Six, I ask how ultimacy guides teacher Ultimate Concern in Teachers’ Lives and Practice \n practice, which is here seen in terms of Pinar’s fourth moment, synthesis, where past, present, and hopeful intentions for the future come together. Chapter Seven turns to Sosnowska and Zanko’s (2022) article, “Three Kairoi – Three Aions. Paul Tillich, Ultimate Concern and Pedagogy of Radical Hope,” as a frame for situating the findings of this study within a larger contemporary educational and historical context. The study ends with a postscript, Danny’s Story, which reveals one student’s radical hope.

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