Re-enchanting the Academy

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