Spiritual Learning Communities: Historical, Systematic, and Practical Observations

Abstract

Children and young people have the inalienable right to be part of a learning community. Nobody can learn on his/her own. Education is always a communal enterprise. In this article the concept of the “spiritual learning community” is developed as a contemporary answer to the socioeducational issues raised by Martin Buber and John Dewey in the 1930s. Cultural and religious diversity today stimulate education and schooling more than ever before to reconsider the narrative-communicative and spiritual dimension of every learning process. The spiritual dimension of the learning community relates to a specific habitus, namely of de-centration from the self and dedication to the other, and to a specific focus, namely on existential questions as content of the learning process. Insights from philosophy of education and from European religious education theory and concrete experiences of teacher education at the universities of Dortmund (Germany) and Wien (Austria) form the horizon for this reflection.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the peer reviewers, the colleagues of the “Interdisciplinary Research Center for Church and Society” in Antwerpen (www.ik-ks.org) and my research assistants in Dortmund (Dr. Katharina Kammeyer, Veronika Burggraf, Kathrin Hanneken, Janieta Jesuthasan, and Christian Noval) for their interesting comments on a previous draft of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bert Roebben

Bert Roebben is Professor of Religious Education at the Faculty of Humanities and Theology of Dortmund University (Germany). E-mail: [email protected]