IN THIS BOOK, sixteen authors encourage the modern academy to remember that portals to enchantment can be found in its hallowed halls, and indeed must be found, if education is to nourish and inspire both heart and mind, if it is to lead future generations of students out of the cave of policy-led bureaucratisation and financially-led consumerism into the creative freedom of their own souls. Our authors offer resistance to the domination of education ‘by belief in the facts revealed solely by mandated standards and standardized testing’ through an appeal to the imagination as primary and foundational, the source of connection to self, others, and world.
Enchantment catches us when we least expect it, not only through our thoughts, but through feelings, sensations, intuitions and instincts—and as Peter Abbs reminded us nearly forty years ago, if we want to promote ‘wholeness of being’ as an educational ideal then our schools and academies must embrace the full spectrum of human ways of knowing, in order to bring new, integrated perspectives to our conflicted world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
About the Contributors
PART ONE
Re-enchanting the Institution
1. Patrick Curry
The Enchantment of Learning and the Fate of our Times
2. Simon Wilson
Clutching the Wheel of St. Catherine; or a Visit to an Enchanted College
3. Linden West
Re-Enchanting the Academy: Popular Education and the Search for Soul in the Modern Academy
4. Eduard Heyning
Not to Explain the World but to Sing it: Panpsychism and the Academy
PART TWO
Re-enchanting the Curriculum
5. Angela Voss
Delectare, Docere, Movere: Soul-learning, Reflexivity and the Third Classroom
6. Robert Bowie
Stepping into Sacred Texts: How the Jesuits Taught me to Read the Bible
7. Lisa McLoughlin
Enchanted Engineering: Reintegrating the Roots
8. Julia Moore
On the Margins of the Academy: Séances, Sitter Groups and Academics
PART THREE
Re-enchanting the Mind
9. Anita Klujber
The Salutogenic Imagination
10. Judith Way
Enrichment and Enchantment: The Poetic Heritage of the Western Esoteric Tradition
11. Becca Tarnas
The Fantastic Imagination
12. Paul Stevens
Engaging the Non-linguistic Mind
PART FOUR
Re-enchanting Nature & Body
13. Chara & Joan Armon
Toward Re-Enchantment: Cultivating Nature Connection and Reverence through Experiential Learning
14. Laura Formenti & Silvia Luraschi
How do you Breathe? Duoethnography as a Means to Re-embody Research in the Academy
15. Laura Shannon
Women with Wings: Right-brain Consciousness and the Learning Process
16. Sonia Overall
The Walking Dead; or Why Psychogeography Matters
