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Article Excerpt
Engaging gifted students in the use of their spiritual intelligence provides opportunities for them to honor life's most meaningful questions: How can I make a difference? Why am I here? Does my life have meaning? Discussing such questions allows students to focus on something larger than their egos; they can connect to the lives of others, the community, the earth, and the cosmos to build a global awareness of the growing challenges in the world. In this article, spiritual intelligence (SQ) is defined as the capacity to use a multisensory approach--including intuition, meditation, and visualization--to access one's inner knowledge in order to solve problems of a global nature (Sisk & Torrance, 2001). The core values of SQ include connectedness, compassion, responsibility, balance, unity, and service. These core values can find natural expression in the curriculum. The definition of SQ, the core capacities, core values, core experiences, key virtues, symbolic system, and brain states identified by Sisk and Torrance are listed in Table 1.
This article introduces individuals who are providing training and programs in higher consciousness and presents strategies for encouraging SQ to develop and flourish in the classroom. Service-learning is examined as an opportunity for the development of the core values of SQ. Finally, a list of likely traits of SQ and ways to strengthen them gleaned from the work of Sisk and Torrance (2001) are presented, followed by a program description of a project for secondary gifted students using SQ as an integrating theme.
POSSIBLE DIMENSIONS OF SQ AND EDUCATION
Early Exploration of SQ
Gardner (1999) examined two classical senses of knowing--knowing how and knowing that--to decide if there was a spiritual intelligence. He recognized skills manifested in SQ as meditating, achieving trance states, and envisioning the transcendental or being in touch with psychic, spiritual, or noetic phenomena. Sisk and Torrance (2001) concurred with these skills and added the skills of "intuition" and "visioning." Gardner said he did not want to risk premature closure by eliminating a set of human capabilities worthy of consideration with his theory of intelligence, so he considered the term existential intelligence. Although Gardner did not conclude that existential intelligence fits with his multiple-intelligence framework, it does represent an important aspect of human potential.
Gifted Students Have a Unique Perception
Gifted students have a unique way of perceiving their world and their relationship to it, and they not only think differently from their peers, they also feel differently (Silverman, 1993). Gifted individuals do not know what creates the drive, energy, or absolute necessity to act. "They may have no choice but to explore, compose, write, paint, develop theories, conduct research, or do whatever else it is that has become uppermost in their minds" (Roeper, 1991, p. 90). Piechowski (1999) explained this difference as intensity, an expanded field of subjective experience. This subjective field of experience can be manifested in spiritual yearnings that include a search for purpose, a hunger for joy, a creative drive, and a need for service (Kessler, 1999; Noddings, 1993; Palmer, 1999).
Education is Fearful of Things Spiritual
SQ can find natural expression in the classroom; yet educators are fearful of things spiritual, and in today's global world, fear is not only in education but everywhere. Parker Palmer (1999), senior associate of the American Association of Higher Education and Senior Advisor to the Fetzer institute, stated this challenge to education:
Fear is everywhere--in our culture, in our institutions, in our students, in ourselves--and it cuts us off from everything. Surrounded and invaded by fear, how can we transcend it and reconnect with reality for the sake of teaching and learning? The only path I know that might take us in that direction is the one marked "spiritual." (p. 6)
Palmer (1999) shared that, as a teacher, he saw the price we pay for a system of education so fearful of things spiritual that it fails to address the real issues of life--dispensing facts at the expense of meaning, and learning information at the expense of wisdom--and that such schooling alienates and dulls students. Palmer defined spiritual as a quest for connectedness with self, with others, with the worlds of history and nature, and with the mystery of being alive.
The Caring Classroom
In the caring classroom, teachers focus on the big picture, provide students opportunities to explore how connectedness applies to them as individuals, and stress the importance of equality and justice. As evidenced by the large number of teachers participating in training on higher levels of consciousness, it is apparent that teachers want to address the broader implications of Gardner's (1983) interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences; Goleman's (1995) emotional intelligence; and the interconnectedness of the learner and the teacher, the local and global community, and the cosmic world. This training is provided by a number of institutes including the Global Ethics Institute of Rushworth Kidder (2006), the Passage Way Institute of Rachael Kessler (2000), and the Naropa Institute of...
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