University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: October 24, 2002

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

Education scholar and theorist Alexander Astin is nationally recognized for his efforts to get academicians to conceptualize, acknowledge and recognize the role that spirituality plays in "unfolding and enriching the lives" of everyone living and working on a college campus.

Astin will be the keynote speaker at a conference, "Fostering Ultimate Meaning: Spirituality as a Legitimate Concern for Higher Education," to be held Nov. 5 and hosted by UB that will address the relationship between spirituality, learning and student development.

The conference will be held in the University Inn and Conference Center, 2402 North Forest Road, Amherst, from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Registration is $30, $20 for full-time students and includes lunch. For registration information, contact Patrick Zengierski at 645-2998 or pjz@buffalo.edu.

"Some would say that 'spiritual development' is not the purview of the university," acknowledges Dennis Black, vice president for student affairs, "but Astin maintains that for far too long, academia has encouraged us to lead fragmented and inauthentic lives. He insists that higher education must address the fact that students, faculty and staff are spiritual beings and that their spiritual side is relevant to their vocation or work."

Astin is Allan Murray Cartter Professor of Higher Education and Work in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He directs the school's Higher Education Research Institute, a noted interdisciplinary center for research, evaluation, information, policy studies and research training in post-secondary education.

The conference will be sponsored by the Newman Center, Student Affairs, the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy in the Graduate School of Education, and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).

The agenda will include discussion of whether spirituality is a legitimate concern in higher education and, if so, whether issues of the spirit should be given a central place—not just in teaching and learning, but in academic discourse in general.

"Participants also will look at how meaning and spirituality in the lives of college faculty are related to intergroup relations, values, authenticity and stress—topics that are frequently addressed by Astin in his publications and presentations," said conference coordinator Zengierski of the Newman Center,

Conference organizers explain that current theories about how spiritual development fits into the constellation of student development theories arose out of the work of theologian and educational theorist Sharon Deloz Parks.

Parks' work, which focuses on young adulthood as a stage of faith development, is grounded in the psychosocial and cognitive/structural traditions of student development theory. Her theories grew out of the research of psychologists Jean Piaget, William Perry, Robert Kegan, Erik Erikson, Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan, all of who address and define the stages of intellectual, moral and ethical development.

In Parks' terms, spiritual development does not require involvement in a specific religious practice, but an increasing openness to the exploration of a relationship with an intangible and pervasive essence that exists beyond human existence and rational human knowing.

Spiritual development is variously defined as an internal process of seeking personal authenticity, genuineness and wholeness as an aspect of identity development; the process of continually transcending one's current locus of centricity; the development of a greater connectedness to self and others through relationships and union with community, and the derivation of meaning, purpose and direction in one's life