Chapter 2: The Many Ways to Talk about Spirit and Spirituality in Teacher Education: The Decolonizing Potential of Dialogues About Spirit

In this chapter, I discuss three key discourses in decolonizing education that illustrate why conversations about spirit are necessary for teacher education classrooms. The first uses the Medicine Wheel (Bopp et al., 1989) as a framework for connecting learning to all aspects of a student’s personhood. The second discourse links to the work of Kirkness (Kirkness & Barnhardt, 2001), whose discussion of the four Rs, respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility, offers essential considerations for ensuring the intellectual and cultural safety of Indigenous students and faculty, rooted in Indigenous values. The third discourse comes from the work of Mi’kmaq Elders Murdena and Albert Marshall and their notion of two-eyed seeing (Bartlett et al., 2009). Finally, to provide a context for the consideration of these discourses, I offer the reader a window into a particular moment in my teaching practice that brought to the fore the importance of discussing spirituality in education.