This participatory action research study was conducted to question, articulate and acknowledge a relationship between spirituality and education through researching spiritual components of community-based art. Building on Daniel’s (2006, 2011) concept of spirit work as a component of a community act—a component serving to promote agency through honoring the wholeness of the individual in mind, body and spirit—I sought to demystify the concept of spirituality as intangible or nebulous by seeking behavioral evidence through my involvement in the creation of a community mural. Theory grounded spirituality in demonstrable actions bound in relationship and served as the underpinning for linking behaviors to spirituality, thus defining spirit as praxis, while also highlighting the social and relational nature of learning.
The site for this research chose me. I was asked to collaborate in creating a mural that transformed the perceptions of a space by those living in and looking in to the neighborhood. The goal—in addition to the visual transformation of the physical space—was to mentor neighborhood youth in the development, application and translation of artistic skills towards potential employment in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood. As can happen in community-based work—because of its emergent and process orientation—our mural plans shifted. We were asked to create a mural for the Obama presidential campaign, which we did to great success and despite the lack of participation by the youth for whom we had planned this project. The mural we originally planned to create did not materialize.
And yet, what might be deemed a failure by some proved to be the source for deep learning through the relational, process-oriented nature of the community work. What emerged was a distinction between social and material realms, requiring different ways of relating, understanding, navigating and negotiating (Kaplan, 2002; Kestor, 2004) and the recognition that learning to relationally navigate the social realm promotes self-empowerment and social change in a just manner. I suggest that this relational way of understanding, acting and responding is in fact the underpinning—the methodology—of living a spiritual life, and one that offers avenues for resolving the issues found in the material realm.
The results of this research suggest supporting the further development of holistic educational practices, with art education at the forefront of this, as the skills-based practices support the development of intuitive and relational ways of knowing in counterpoint to reductionist ways that largely define educational systems today. Furthermore, the dialogic practices found in contemporary art (Kestor, 2004) offer imaginative avenues for addressing social transformation and can be translated into educational practices.