Learning Through Spiritual Encounters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This qualitative study built upon prior research on spirituality in higher education and was informed by my own interests in spiritual memoir. The study used heuristic phenomenology and narrative research methodologies to explore how attentiveness, willingness, and responsiveness are present when learning takes place through spiritual encounters. In Phase 1, 140 Canadian adults responded to a survey asking whether respondents had a self-identified spiritual encounter that taught them something. The questionnaire also included questions about the nature of the learning, spiritual identity, comfort levels discussing spirituality, and the impact of COVID-19. In Phase 2, 10 participants from Phase 1 were interviewed, resulting in first-person narratives co-created by myself and the participants. A multi-layered process of coding was undertaken on the full data set, which included the questionnaire responses and the narratives. Twelve themes emerged, suggesting that learning from spiritual encounters often happened at times of death and dying, involved a voice or a presence, took place in the natural world, and/or involved a heightened awareness of the body, senses, and emotions. Participants were often willing to ask questions or to take leaps of courage. In response to a spiritual encounter, participants reported making lifestyle or identity changes. The study suggested that spiritual encounters are not ineffable; many participants were precise with language and thoughtful in their descriptions. Other factors, such as fear of ridicule or judgement, respect for their own boundaries, or another’s capacity to receive their story with care, influenced their decision to share. This research suggested that the conceptual framework of attentiveness, willingness, and responsiveness, related to Quaker processes of spiritual discernment, may be a useful reflexive tool in approaching learning through spiritual encounters. Implications for professionals working in education, healthcare, wellness settings, ministry, and sustainability were explored. New reflections on work cited in the literature were also discussed, including implications for graduate courses on spirituality in adult education, spiritual autobiography, and future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".