I am most spiritual when I tap into this creativity, and as a teacher, I try to set up my classroom as a creative place and find the ways each student is most creative. This perspective understands creativity as a divine capacity. Human beings not only have the ability to create, but they have the capacity to make conscious choices to use these creative gifts selfishly or for the common good. How we do this how we build the earth' to use Teilhard de Chardin's phrase is determined by the discovery and use of our gifts . In a world in which children's imaginative capacity is increasingly stunted and co-opted by mass media in the name of profit, it becomes critical to strengthen the imagination for the common good.
Educators can recognize and encourage each student's unique creative gifts.
While teachers may choose to emphasize artistic forms such as dance, drama, visual arts, and music, there is also the possibility of demonstrating the creative process that underlies discovery in all disciplines and fields. This includes the art of educating as an act of creative spirit. If there is a central image that ties all these categories together, it is connections . Each way of thinking about spirituality and education emphasizes differing kinds of connections with one's inner self, with others, with the world, with nature, with knowledge, with the divine, with religious figures, with emotions, with the body, with imagination, and with the creative process. Sometimes educators tell me that they wish they could contribute to students' spiritual education, but they feel restricted because they teach in a public school.