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The Intersection of Spirituality and SEL at Brandeis
Dr. Dan Glass, Head of School
I write this in the Newark International Airport, waiting for my flight back to San Francisco. I have just spent two days at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, discussing how spirituality, environmental awareness, and the democratic ideals of our nation are interrelated, and how we can nurture each in educational settings. Teacher’s College is reserved in polished wood tones, imbued it seems with the contemplative spirits of John Dewey and Maxine Greene and other great philosophers of education who have researched and taught in its halls. The Newark airport glitters very differently, lit by thousands of screens, tablets shouting from every table top. The contrast—where and how we conceive of learning, and the world we are ostensibly preparing our students for—is striking.
I write this in the Newark International Airport, waiting for my flight back to San Francisco. I have just spent two days at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, discussing how spirituality, environmental awareness, and the democratic ideals of our nation are interrelated, and how we can nurture each in educational settings. Teacher’s College is reserved in polished wood tones, imbued it seems with the contemplative spirits of John Dewey and Maxine Greene and other great philosophers of education who have researched and taught in its halls. The Newark airport glitters very differently, lit by thousands of screens, tablets shouting from every table top. The contrast—where and how we conceive of learning, and the world we are ostensibly preparing our students for—is striking.
Sitting here, I am reminded of another in-between moment in my life, when I had a layover here in New Jersey on my way home from my junior year abroad, which I spent in Alcala de Henares, Spain. I remember feeling alienated by the garish Americanness of the spectacle in Newark—even then, a time long before wireless internet and touchscreen interfaces—wishing I could somehow go back to the quietude and longer histories of the medieval university where I had spent the year studying.
My presentation at this conference—the National Council on Spirituality in Education’s annual gathering—was on “SESL,” or Social Emotional and Spiritual Learning at Brandeis, and how we have learned about and connected the two practices over the past few years. I shared about work a faculty committee did four years ago to understand our current practices, about how we engaged the Institute for Social and Emotional Learning in an 18-month schoolwide professional development project, and about the ways that we have embedded spiritual and social emotional reflective practices in the mission and daily and weekly classroom rituals at Brandeis.
It was fun to be able to share some of what makes our school a unique place; I am struck now, in reflecting on the work in this reflective place, how important and how difficult it is to ground students in an authentic spiritual identity that is unique to each of them. As Dr. Steven Rockefeller said in his keynote address, “spiritual development is needed to nurture the democratic spirit, which is itself a great moral ideal… America today is a nation in search of its soul.”
Sitting here, between the mahogany of Columbia and the black mirrors of Newark, my wish for us all is that we continue to nurture a democratic spirit, in ourselves and in every child under our care, and in so doing move our nation closer to the brightest ideals of its founding.
