Teachers taking spiritual turns: A practice-centred approach to educators and spirituality via Michel Foucault

Abstract

In the face of challenging circumstances, many teachers turn to spirituality for sustenance and strength. Yet spirituality’s place in education and in educators’ lives has long been a matter of confusion and contention, not least because of the ambiguity of the term in its common usage. What is its relationship to religion? And what defines it? In this article, I submit that the later work of Michel Foucault offers a helpful approach to spirituality that displaces those questions—drawing attention away from beliefs and/or attitudes professed, and towards the process of practical self-transformation that subjects undertake for the sake of a truth that is actualised in the body. To be spiritual in this sense is more a matter of what one does than what one believes or who one is. To offer a sense of why it matters in the lives of educators, I draw on the experiences of a San Diego high school teacher confronting interlocking personal, professional, and political challenges as a detailed example.

Keywords:

• Spirituality
• teachers
• subjectivity
• Foucault
• religion

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt some difficult years to teachers’ work and lives. For those who work with historically underserved communities like San Diego-based high school English teacher Jon Salunga, the pandemic has exacerbated what were already challenging work conditions (Carver-Thomas et al., 2021). This is not to mention the personal burdens of living through a deadly health crisis. Apart from the shift to online teaching and the accompanying challenges of connectivity and added workload, Salunga also had to cope with the grief of losing a family member to COVID-19 (Sweas, 2021). Amidst this maelstrom, he describes in an interview to the Religion News Service (RNS) how he drew on mindfulness techniques, which enabled him to de-stress, as well as maintain compassion for himself and his students.

Mindfulness

I imagine the mere sight of the word might trigger allergic reactions amongst some readers, and perhaps for good reason. While this journal has played host to more nuanced discussions of mindfulness in education than the unalloyed celebration and patrician suspiciousness that characterise its popular reception (e.g. Greenland, 2010; Purser, 2019)—for instance, by fielding explorations of Asian philosophies of mindfulness vis-à-vis theoretical frames like modernity/postmodernity (Blom & Lu, 2016), Ellen Langer’s social psychology (Tan, 2021), Bernard Stiegler’s studies on the technics of attention (e.g. Reveley, 2015), and sustainability (Malone & Tran, 2023; Wang, 2017)—it has also registered growing discomfort at the social implications of its uncritical uptake (Jackson, 2020; Sojot, 2022). Having mapped the contours of debates over mindfulness practice in education elsewhere (Low, 2019, 2021, 2022), I do not wish to rehearse them here. Rather, with reference to the example of Salunga, I will treat mindfulness practice as one species of a genus: one type of practice that illustrates the relationship between subjectivity and truth more broadly, and more specifically a way of arranging that relationship—spirituality. I take my lead from the later work of Michel Foucault because, as I will argue in this article, he offers a unique approach to studying the phenomenon as a process of practical self-transformation that subjects undertake for the sake of a truth.

Of course, it can be argued that placing any practice under the category of ‘spirituality’ is far from clarifying. Indeed, despite the approximately 40-fold increase in scholarly publications on spirituality since the 1970s, there is a marked lack of consensus on what the term means owing to researchers’ espousal of preferred definitions (Oman, 2013, pp. 23–24). At the risk of adding yet one more definition into the unwieldy mix, it is the argument of this article that Foucault’s approach to spirituality offers two unique benefits for researchers interested in its relationship to education. Firstly, by resituating spirituality as a practice-centred process of transformation that aims toward an embodied truth, while remaining open-ended about whatever that ‘truth’ might be for each subject within their specific historical conjuncture (Rae, 2022), Foucault offers a different lens through which to discern what counts as spiritual (or not). Importantly, this eases the necessity of having to define some spiritual essence apart from religion while allowing for non-religious practices to be taken as spiritual. And secondly, it circumvents the simultaneously vague and substantive bent of prevailing definitions of spirituality in education and in educators’ lives that situate it at the level of psychological attitudes—what Carr (1995) sardonically describes as ‘a hotchpotch of only vaguely connected items of cognition, intuition and feeling’ characterised by ‘various vague feelings of awe and wonder in relation to everything under the sun’ (pp. 84–85). I will illustrate these points below with reference to the experiences of Jon Salunga as a detailed example of why spirituality in educators’ lives matters as an object of scholarly attention. Before returning to the San Diego teacher, I will first briefly canvass the challenges facing scholars in the field of spirituality and education more broadly, and the study of spirituality in the lives of educators more specifically.

Spirituality, education, and educators

Spirituality’s place in education has long been a matter of confusion and contention for educators (e.g. Erricker, 1998; Lovat, 2017; Moulin-Stożek, 2020; Schwebel, 2017; Sokanovic & Muller, 1999). This reflects the broader ambiguity of the term in its common usage. Spirituality, Sheldrake (2012) suggests, ‘is chameleon-like in that it takes on the shape and priorities of the different contexts in which it is used’ (pp. 1–2). Given this vagueness, a number of scholars have stepped in to offer a way forward for educators. This usually involves two steps: first, while acknowledging the historical association between religion and spirituality, distinguishing between the two by treating the former as ‘organized’ and ‘formal’ (i.e. institutional) and the latter as attitudinal; and second, offering some sort of working definition of spirituality, most commonly entailing both a substantive meaning (e.g. perception of something ‘beyond oneself’) and a normative appeal (e.g. health, wellbeing, criticality, etc.) (e.g. Crawford & Rossiter, 2006; De Souza & Halafoff, 2018; Webster, 2022; Wright, 2001).

When we focus specifically on teachers and spirituality, this two-step approach is also evident. Bhandari’s (2021) study of Australian teachers’ spiritualties—which includes a considered canvassing of the concept’s history and debates surrounding it—distinguishes spirituality from religion to yield the working definition: ‘Spirituality is the awareness of self and experience of oneness with all, in the universe and beyond, through this self-knowledge’ (Bhandari, 2021, p. 18). Like Bhandari (2021) who makes clear that ‘a spirituality/religion binary that is not necessarily an opposition’ (p. 51), de Klerk-Luttig (2008) addresses the ‘spiritual stuntedness’ of South African teachers by teasing out the relationship between religion and spirituality en route to defining the latter as ‘a specific dimension of life and experience’—’it either consists of or leads to experiences of connectedness with our deepest selves, other human and non-human souls, to the natural world and the cosmos beyond and the larger purposes and powers that transcend an ego’s limited concerns’ (p. 507). Evans-Amalu et al. (2021) study of early-childhood and elementary preservice teachers combines both the subtraction of religion and addition of substance and normativity in their definition, offering ‘a secular understanding of the term [spirituality]’ as ‘facets of a human’s life that include more than what we can see, touch, or hear’ (p. 209). These examples of scholarship on teachers and spirituality are illustrative of the prevalence of this two-step approach, which can in turn be linked to canonical texts on it (e.g. Palmer, 1983, 2003).

The extent to which spirituality as such can be clearly distinguished from religion is an open question, as testified in the pains scholars such as the abovementioned go through to nuance their claims. As pointedly put by Crawford and Rossiter (2006): ‘Because of its long historical links with religion, spirituality poses problems for education’ (p. 236). However, they also argue that this problem can be generative for research, for instance on the divergence between the spiritual and the religious, or on the nature and psychological functions of spirituality. I share the perspective that this tension has been productive for research—for instance, explaining demographic trends like ‘spiritual but not religious’ (Bouma, 2007; Tacey, 2004). And given colonial-capitalism’s track record of hyper-individualisation, overexploitation, genocide, and ecocide (Stein et al., 2022), our world could do worse than be educated for connection to human and nonhuman others. Yet there are persistent challenges for this two-step approach to spirituality. Is it necessary to subtract the religious to arrive at the spiritual? Is being spiritual part of human nature? And do subjects have to believe in something ‘beyond’ or feel ‘connected’ to be spiritual? Following Cottingham (2003), Eksen (2018) rightly points out that such presuppositions carry ‘metaphysical freight’—they are ‘marked by metaphysically loaded presumptions concerning human nature and the reality it faces’ (p. 277). Given these axiomatic challenges facing scholars in the field of spirituality and education, I suggest that Foucualt’s approach to spirituality offers an alternative way forward. And for why it matters specifically for the study of spirituality in educators’ lives, I return to Jon Salunga in San Diego.

Amidst suffering

In the RNS interview, Salunga explains how he had learnt to apply mindfulness to his professional life at a retreat he had attended while undergoing teacher education. Led by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, he also learnt there that ‘happy teachers will change the world’, which he takes to mean understanding ‘how to transform suffering—my suffering, the suffering of my students, their generation, their communities, our collective experience’ (Sweas, 2021). This clarification is significant not only because is differentiates ‘happy’ as understood in this Buddhist tradition from more prosaic uses of the term, but also because it hints at how Salunga understands mindfulness practice in relation to his own experiences and those of his students—it is for ‘transforming suffering’. What is this ‘suffering’? Over a decade prior to this interview, Salunga had given another where he offered some details on his own: a 6-year-old child of an immigrant family from the Philippines and the sense of ‘being uprooted, of having to reestablish myself in a new culture and land, having to translate myself in a new language, to make decisions about who I am now’; the ‘profound sense of cultural loss’ he felt as English was prioritised in his family for educational success; the resigned acceptance of his mother’s degradation in the US labour market as her qualifications as a school teacher were unrecognised, consigning her to two low-skilled jobs to make ends meet; and his desire to gain proximity to the dominant culture by ‘speaking white’ at school and distancing himself from other migrant students (in Nhat Hanh, 2010, pp. 202–204). This experience, he sums up, demonstrates ‘the subtle, penetrative work of colonialism, of racism’, how the ‘insidious process of assimilation that happens without us even knowing that we are giving up parts of ourselves, distorting ourselves, prioritizing one form of knowing, of history, of culture, over another’ (Salunga, in Nhat Hanh, 2010, p. 204).

At the University of California San Diego in the late-1990s during his undergraduate years, Salunga worked to resist this colonialism and racism. While undertaking his degree major in Ethnic Studies, he was also involved in facilitating student-initiated projects around diversity issues (Salunga, n.d.), researched ‘race and space’ on campus (Sung, 1998), and interned at the university’s Cross-Cultural Centre to ‘break barriers, challenge ideas, to affirm experiences and empower ourselves’ (cited in Welch, 2014, p. 2). He had become a community activist. Yet by the time of his retreat with Nhat Hanh in the mid-2000s, he had begun to notice that ‘there’s a hardness, a fierceness, a loudness, an edginess in how I and others assert ourselves’ in such spaces, which may be ‘because we hope to claim our power back by adopting the models of power that we’ve been oppressed by’ (Salunga, in Nhat Hanh, 2010, p. 205). He was at a point in his life—a spiritual turning point—which did not necessitate a turning away from the Roman Catholicism of his Filipino heritage (Sweas, 2021), but did require searching beyond its traditional bounds. ‘I had to struggle to craft a different kind of spiritual identity for myself’ (Salunga, in Nhat Hanh, 2010, p. 202). What did he find?

The Dharma [i.e. Buddhist teachings] gave me a chance to see myself anew. It taught me that all of us have the seeds of awakening. I had never heard in school or church something that so quickly affirmed me and gave me back to myself. It gave me confidence to see myself differently, to see my community and culture and ancestry, my experience, from a lens of wholeness instead of deficit. The Dharma ‘flips the script.’ (Salunga, in Nhat Hanh, 2010, p. 205)

Salunga’s allies may well have been perplexed by his turn. We get a hint of this in his account of first encountering Nhat Hanh’s practices, which can be read as ventriloquy of the broader sensibility in his activist milieu: ‘My doubting mind screamed out, ‘What’s this walking slow gonna do for me and my community? What’s me [mindfully] eating and staying quiet supposed to do when I get home to my reality?’’ (Salunga, in Nhat Hanh, 2010, p. 205). His answer is that Buddhist mindfulness practices awaken one to the truth—’seeing ourselves whole, in whatever place, time, and historical moment we exist’—which allows for creative remaking of oneself beyond the cultural scripts of the status quo and oppositional reactions to it.

Turning to spirituality

Nearly four decades prior to Salunga’s interview with the RNS, another teacher also took a turn to spirituality, one that was for many ‘unanticipated, even startling’ (Rabinow, 2009, p. 36). Up to this point, Michel Foucault’s public lectures at the Collège de France appeared to line up with the vast research programme outlined in his 1970 inaugural lecture: archaeological studies of discourse and genealogies of the effective formation of discourses, especially relating to criminality, psychiatry, and sexuality (Macey, 2019, pp. 244–245). Based on his work up to this point, Foucault was—and still is—seen as the arch-theorist of ‘power/knowledge’ regimes (e.g. Pollard, 2019). For a time, the most commonly cited scholarly works on Foucault’s relevance to any field—say, education—focused almost entirely on how modern knowledges (e.g. developmental psychology, teacher codes) and institutional technologies (e.g. rules of conduct, timetables, policies) come together to form docile subjects, students and teachers both (e.g. Ball, 1990; Hall & Millard, 1994; Marshall, 1989; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1997; Ryan, 1991). This is unsurprising given these themes made up the bulk of his life’s work from the publication of his doctoral dissertation (Foucault, 1961) up to his public pronouncements in the late-1970s like ‘power is ‘always already there’, that one is never ‘outside’ it, that there are no ‘margins’ for those who break with the system to gambol in’ (Foucault, 1980, 141). But in his reportage and interviews from 1978 onwards—charged by his experiences in Japan and Iran—Foucault (1999, pp. 110–114, 2020) had already begun to foreshadow an ‘exit’ strategy from ‘the ‘normal’ Western subject formations of the rational autonomous individual and the deep self, the products of the power/knowledge regime of Western modernity’ (Vintages, 2011, p. 106).

Then in his lecture of 6 January 1982, Foucault identifies the dimension missing from modern philosophy—the component whose elimination or marginalisation produced centuries of misplaced assurance arising from and instantiating a quest for method (Rabinow, 2009, p. 36)—as spirituality. While Foucault had indeed touched on spirituality prior to this, notably glossed in his account of Christian asceticism and mysticism as forms of ‘counter-conduct’ against the Church’s exercise of ‘pastoral power’ (e.g. Foucault, 2007; also Bernauer, 2009), this lecture places it at the centre. The rise of modern forms of knowledge that he had hitherto linked to discipline, normalization, and biopolitics is now held to be the result of despiritualised philosophy (Gallo, 2017; McGushin, 2007, p. xxii). He defines spirituality as ‘the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself [sic] in order to have access to the truth’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 15).

This is a unique definition of spiritualty. It centres on what is done and the effects of such doings rather than on beliefs and attitudes, which as we have seen predominates educational scholarship on it. Foucault helpfully expands on three elements of spirituality given in his pithy definition. First, ‘the search’. Spirituality ‘postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right’, and ‘that the subject as such does not have right of access to the truth and is not capable of having access to the truth’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 15). In modern philosophy and sciences, Foucault (2005) holds that the subject is related to truth through ‘a simple act of knowledge (connaissance)’ (p. 15)—that is, ‘purely mental or cognitive experience of evidence that allows us to verify the relationship between statements and objective states of affairs’ (McGushin, 2014, p. 473). Spirituality, by contrast, is fundamentally defined by problematising the subject’s very being: ‘The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play. For as he is, the subject is not capable of truth’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 15). In other words, it begins with the subject’s realisation that they must make an effort to progress toward the truth, and that distance cannot be closed through the accumulation of knowledge or the application of a method.

Clearly there are different types of truth at play in knowledge and spirituality. Two years prior to this 1982 lecture, Foucault (2014) had distinguished between two types of truth: one is ‘alethurgy’, which is ‘the manifestation of truth as the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten’; and the other ‘the production of truth in the consciousness of individuals by logico-experimental procedures’, which is the object of modern scientific and ‘objective’ knowledges (p. 7). One takes truth to be an achievement through practices and rituals carried out by the subject; the other takes truth to be pre-existent and waiting to be ‘unveiled’ or ‘disclosed’ through knowledge (Deere, 2014, p. 523). We can see the former in Salunga’s account, where the Buddha’s Dharma on transforming suffering stood beyond him—his subjectivity as conditioned by ‘the subtle, penetrative work of colonialism, of racism’. Hence his realisation that he had to ‘struggle to craft a different kind of spiritual identity.’ Spirituality’s first component, then, consists in precisely this sort of realisation—that there is work on the self that needs to be done in pursuit of an alethurgical truth, one that needs to be actualised in the body.

This brings us to the second and key characteristic of Foucault’s conception of spirituality: practice. Practices are necessary because ‘there can be no truth without a conversion or a transformation of the subject’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 15). ‘Conversion’ involves ‘a movement that removes the subject from his current status and condition’, which Foucault (2005) calls ‘the movement of erōs (love)’ (pp. 15-16). And this conversion is made effective by ‘transformation’, which denotes ‘work of the self on the self, an elaboration of the self by the self, a progressive transformation of the self by the self for which one takes responsibility in a long labor of ascesis (askēsis)’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 16). Foucault (2005) lists a few examples of such self-work from ancient Western philosophy like ‘ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence’ (p. 15), to which many more could of course be added. There are longstanding philosophies across the globe that centre on self-cultivation (Peters, 2022a), including Japanese Zen Buddhist practices and Iranian Shi’i Islamic rituals whose potentials for yielding ‘a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false’ fascinated Foucault during his lifetime (Foucault, 1991, p. 82; also Konik, 2016; Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2016).

Taken together, the desire/love for the truth (erōs) and the labour (askēsis) undertaken in its pursuit changes the subject in their very way of being (McGushin, 2007, p. 39; also Peters, 2022b). Spirituality is thus distinguished from knowledge by its insistence on such practices because ‘for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 15). This is necessary because as they are, the subject cannot see the truth, ‘cannot discover it through trying to ‘know’ things because its very being prevents it from doing so’, hence the subject ‘must transform its way of being, its way of letting things appear to it’ (McGushin, 2007, pp. 39–40). Registering his agitation at ‘walking slow’ and ‘[mindfully] eating and staying quiet’, Salunga expresses this difficult conversion of body and mind. Such gruelling work on the self illustrates what Foucault means when he says: ‘The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 15).

What is so special about this type of truth that subjects are willing to pay such a price for it? According to Foucault—and this is the third characteristic of his definition—alethurgical truth yields an ‘experience’ that exceeds what knowledge can bring:

The truth enlightens the subject; the truth gives beatitude to the subject; the truth gives the subject tranquility of the soul. In short, in the truth acnd in access to the truth, there is something that fulfills the subject himself, which fulfills or transfigures his very being. (Foucault, 2005, p. 16)

The truth acquired in spiritual pursuit, in other words, has ‘rebound effects’ for the subject insofar as it radically changes their experience of themselves in the world. This is of a different quality to truths gained from the accumulation of facts (i.e. no rebound effects). Truth attained through spirituality, by contrast, is fundamentally transformative for the subject. As Salunga testifies, the ‘Dharma gave me a chance to see myself anew’ and ‘flips the script’ on the self that colonialism and racism had bestowed him. For Foucault, in light of the impoverished self-techniques of modernity that are ‘over-determined by surveilling and scrutinizing disciplines and governing practices’ (Vintages, 2011, p. 103), such radical self-transformation enabled through spirituality is no small thing. In a 1978 interview, he says:

It seems to me that that possibility of rising up from the subject position that had been fixed for you by a political power, a religious power, a dogma, a belief, a habit, a social structure, and so on – that’s spirituality, that is, becoming other than what one is, other than oneself. (Foucault, 2020, p. 128).

To summarise, what we have here is a definition of spirituality entailing: (1) a search by the subject who recognises that as they are they cannot attain to an alethurgical truth; (2) practices entailing continuous self-work animated by a desire for truth; and (3) an experience of radical transformation such that they become other than who they were—especially what society has made them out to be. Having walked through Foucault’s approach to spirituality via Salunga as a detailed example of what it might look like in the lived experience of a teacher, we can now consider what this offers beyond prevailing definitions of spirituality in education scholarship. Foucault’s approach to spirituality displaces the burden of cleanly distinguishing it from religion and positing a substantive, normative definition of it. Studies of spirituality can instead focus on practices of self-transformation (askēsis) undertaken in pursuit of alethurgical truth. As Eksen (2018) points out, rather than describing spirituality as ‘a set of thoughts, attitudes and experiences which may be analyzed independently of religious traditions’, Foucault’s approach ‘aims to elucidate the nature of spirituality without making any substantive claim about the nature of the self or her experience of the world. Instead, the primary focus is on the formal conditions of the self’s search for truth’ (pp. 273–274).

While some astute interpreters of Foucault may still be anxious to take the first step, pointing out that his account of spirituality is ‘not religious’ (e.g. Besley & Peters, 2007, p. 8; McGushin, 2014, p. 472; Negri, in Revel, 2016), thinking of it as practice-centred process sidesteps this distinction. ‘Spirituality is something that can be found in religion but also outside of religion’, holds Foucault and Bremner (2020, p. 123). Note, for instance, how he detects spirituality sometimes in religious contexts like Christian asceticism and mysticism (Foucault, 2007, pp. 207–214), and in the Shi’i Islam of the Iranian revolution (Foucault, in Afary & Anderson, 2005, pp. 203–209, 250–260). At other times he finds it outside of conventionally defined religion, say, in surrealism (Foucault, 1999, p. 72), or in Graeco-Roman philosophy’s ‘care of the self’ (Foucault, 1985, 1986). So, while a teacher engaging in mindfulness practices to de-stress so that they can feel more ‘normal’ or be a ‘better teacher’ by conventional standards is neither spiritual nor religious by this account, Salunga is both spiritual and religious given his identification with his heritage Roman Catholicism and Nhat Hanh’s tradition of Zen Buddhism. The spiritual key here is that mindfulness practices are for him askēsis for seeking the truth—Buddha’s Dharma via Nhat Hanh—that ‘happy teachers will change the world’, and through which his very being has been transformed. As Foucault and Bremner (2020) puts it pithily, ‘the problem isn’t knowing if the tool [i.e., spiritual practice] is religious or not; the problem is knowing what the value of the tool is in relation to this will [for alterity]’ (p. 128).

And because Foucault’s approach to spirituality displaces the problem of religiosity/non-religiosity by offering a practice-centred account of it, it also does not need to posit a substantive definition. It focuses our attention instead on the embodied effects of a discourse—whether classed as religious or not—that are at play in the subject’s quest for truth (Eksen, 2018, p. 289). If the relationship between the subject and truth is marked by a pursuit of alethurgy leading to radical self-transformation, then it is spirituality. For this ‘thin’ approach to spirituality Foucault has been criticised, not least by Pierre Hadot (e.g. 1995, p. 208), whose account of ancient philosophy as incorporating ‘spiritual exercises’ was almost certainly where Foucault drew some inspiration. Yet as I have suggested with reference to the scholarship on spirituality in education, it is Foucault’s reticence to specify the content of spirituality that enables him to jettison the metaphysical freight that comes with substantive, not to mention normative approaches to it.

Concluding reflections

‘I can’t say I'm a “happy teacher”’, Salunga (personal communication, November 26, 2022) shares, ‘but this teaching from [Nhat Hanh] continues to serve as a powerful, on-going point of reflection.’ This honest admission from Salunga speaks less to his level of spiritual attainment than the nature of spirituality itself, at least as it has been characterised in this article: a process of seeking alethurgical truth through practices of self-work (askēsis), which yield experiences of radical self-transformation. We can see how this process continues to reshape his sense of himself and his way of being in the world: ‘transforming “what gets in the way” of presence, connectedness, authenticity, well-being and happiness in my teaching work’ (J. Salunga, personal communication, November 26, 2022).

With this emphasis on practices and process, we have an analytical approach to the phenomenon of spirituality in education that focuses less on beliefs and attitudes professed (even less whether we agree or disagree with them), and more on the embodied effects of practices undertaken in pursuit of a truth. Yet the question arises: how can effects of spirituality—a radical transformation of the subject qua subject—be substantiated, especially given Foucault’s masterful earlier accounts of how widely and deeply we are enframed within contemporary regimes of power/knowledge, with their sophisticated disciplinary and biopolitical self-techniques? One avenue is through careful observation and listening, attending to the work that spiritual practices do in shaping people’s embodied lives (e.g. Mahmood, 2005)—their ‘aesthetics of existence’, to use Foucault’s (1985, p. 11) parlance. In the study of spirituality in education and in educators’ lives, this means paying attention to accounts like Salunga’s.

‘Integrating mindfulness into my teaching has provided me a method to hold all the complexities and potentialities of my work as a public school educator’, says Salunga (personal communication, November 26, 2022), ‘the 10,000 joys and sorrows of working with my kiddos, ‘working in the system’, and hopefully cultivating enough wisdom, skill, heart and presence to make this time worthwhile and beneficial.’

Some may dismiss this as just one more example of desperately overworked teachers seeking palliative self-help short of social change. But in doing so we may miss what is truly radical about spirituality: ‘that is, wanting, not for the situation or the facts to change, but instead knowing that they can’t be changed if one doesn’t change oneself’ (Foucault & Bremner, 2020, p. 127). In a society that devalues the labour of teachers (and the lives of minoritised peoples), I suggest that spiritual turns undergone by educators like Salunga warrant our careful attention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Remy Yi Siang Low

Remy Yi Siang Low is committed to cultivating culturally responsive educators who can work in diverse contexts. This informs his research in the history and philosophy of education. He is Senior Lecturer at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney.