Editor's Choice: Caring, Community, and Transcendance—Developing Spirit to Improve Learning:

Fortunately, American colleges and universities have escaped the school violence carried out in Arkansas, Oregon, and Colorado in 1998 and 1999. Institutions of higher education, influenced by cultural changes, play less of a parental role than they did 30 years ago. Faculty, however, regularly see disaffected, lonely, isolated, and fearful students pass through our classrooms every year. Many of us concentrate on the subject matter, believing the alienation of students not to be in our domain. Because of the intense relationships that develop over a semester or a year of study, faculty members have opportunities to influence students personally, even as our primary goal remains to help them master a field of study. Some faculty disdain becoming involved in students' emotional or spiritual lives, while others embrace any opportunity. The primary purpose of this paper is to discuss how faculty can and do develop a spirit in the classes they teach and thus become more effective teachers. Spirit has numerous definitions, including religious, sacred, and moral ones not directly applicable here, but those useful for this paper are "the breath of life" or "a character, disposition, or temper peculiar to and often animating a particular individual or group." Of course, once we use spirit, we can't ignore the adjectival form spiritual, the first definition being "of the nature of spirit rather than material." Another useful definition is "related or joined in spirit; spiritually akin; having a relationship one to another based on matter of the spirit." These definitions, all from Webster's Third International Unabridged Dictionary, point to the essential problem of this paper, expressed eloquently by Conze (1967): "Spirit is non-sensuous and we have no sense-data to work on. In addition spiritual actions are disintegrated when reflected upon. If they are not to lose their bloom, they must be performed unconsciously and automatically" (p. 23). He argues, however, that because it is the spiritual aspects of life that breathe meaning into it, "It seems rather stupid to discard the life-giving qualities of these realms simply because they do not conform to a standard of truth suited only to the natural world, where to the scientist phenomena appear worthy of notice only if they are capable of repetition, public observation, and measurement'' (p. 24). So despite the lack of hard data about student performance or even descriptions of repeatable techniques by teachers, I will proceed because I am convinced, like Conze, of the importance of the spiritual aspects of life, particularly that aspect that concerns us here: teaching and learning. Perhaps a more traditional way of speaking about the spirit of a class would be to say the feeling or the affective qualities of a class. I became aware of different feelings in classes as a participant in a faculty development program called first the New Jersey Master Faculty Program and later Partners in Learning in which faculty pairs sit in each other's classes over at least a semester and sometimes a year. For a full description of this program, see Katz & Henry (1988) or Smith & LaCelle-Peterson (1991). These pairs focused not on the performance of the teacher but rather on the response of the students to the teacher. In addition to the observations, each partner interviewed students in the observed class. Although these interviews could follow any number of themes, the basic focus was, "How do students learn?" For this paper I followed the same mode of inquiry outlined by Katz and Henry, sitting in on classes--not just once, but many times--both at a community college and at a university. I interviewed faculty from all types of colleges and universities and interviewed students from the classes that I perceived to be imbued with a breath of life, a spirit that not only supported learning but also the students themselves. The three professors whom I determined to have created the most spirit in their classes all taught at a community college. …