Daniel G. Scott

Retrospective Spiritual Narratives: Exploring Recalled Childhood and Adolescent Spiritual Experiences.

This paper draws on a collection of retrospective narratives of childhood and adolescent spiritual experiences to explore the qualities and characteristics of the spirituality of the young. They recall a range of spiritual experiences that touch on death, mortality, visions, and perceptions and connections beyond the self. Their experiences include varying intensities of emotion and invoke a range of responses in them and others. The paper considers the social, emotional and familial context of these early life experiences and their impact on spiritual experience and the possibility/impossibility and freedom/lack of freedom to express, and integrate spirituality.This paper draws on a collection of retrospective narratives of childhood and adolescent spiritual experiences to explore the qualities and characteristics of the spirituality of the young. They recall a range of spiritual experiences that touch on death, mortality, visions, and perceptions and connections beyond the self. Their experiences include varying intensities of emotion and invoke a range of responses in them and others. The paper considers the social, emotional and familial context of these early life experiences and their impact on spiritual experience and the possibility/impossibility and freedom/lack of freedom to express, and integrate spirituality.

Spirituality in Child and Youth Care: Considering Spiritual Development and “Relational Consciousness”

In response to the identification of spiritual development as part of childrens lives in both the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1991) and the Association for Child and Youth Care Practices document: Competencies for Professional Child and Youth Work Practitioners (Mattingly & Stuart, 2001), this paper considers a theoretical model of childrens spirituality, “relational consciousness,” as proposed by Hay and Nye (1998). The paper encourages the introduction of a framework for understanding and exploring spiritual development in child and youth care research and practice that respects the cultural and social diversity of both religious and nonreligious settings and the lifespan developmental processes of children.

Rites of passage in adolescent development: A reappreciation

This paper explores rites of passage as a way of understanding and working with adolescents in contemporary contexts. It raises questions about the insights and approaches that rites of passage may offer us in working with adolescents as they come of age and seek to be connected, to value, and to matter in their world: What do rites of passage suggest is critical in the formation of adults? What can we learn from rites of passage that would assist us to act as mentors and guides? What are some implications for our work with contemporary adolescents?

Writing ourselves into being: writing as spiritual self‐care for adolescent girls. Part One

This paper, the first of two parts, reports the claims of a participatory qualitative research project that explores the inner self‐awareness and self‐presentation of adolescent girls based on excerpts from their own adolescent writings. The participants selected material from their own diaries and poetry written between 1969–1999 (ages 11–17) that spoke to their adolescent spiritual concerns. The research team addressed questions of audience, voice, intention in writing and the role writing played in maintaining an inner life and sense of self. The persistent themes that arose were creating solitude, transforming to calm, preserving sensitivity, nurturing voice and connecting beyond the self, while the central identified theme was care of self. This first paper sets out context and process then addresses the first two themes. Part Two, to be published in a later edition of this journal, will explore the remaining themes and some implications for care work with adolescent girls.

Wrestling with the spirit(ual): grappling with theory, practice and pedagogy

This article explores the challenges of researching the spirit(ual) when the researcher questions the processes of research and their applicability to a study of spirituality. Must the spirit(ual) be explored with different considerations and with non‐traditional approaches because of the nature of what is being studied? The question arises initially out of personal difficulty with the interface of spirituality and research but there are implications for effective practice with children and youth and for pedagogical approaches to the young and to those who will work with them. How is the spirit(ual) known and experienced? What might we expect? What might be unexpected in the process? How is this to be realized in research and teaching?

The spiritual as critical and political

This is a pre-print of an article later published in the International Journal of Childrens Spirituality.

Peak experience project

This paper emerges from the continued analysis of data collected in a series of international studies concerning Childhood Peak Experiences (CPEs) based on developments in understanding peak experiences in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs initiated by Dr Edward Hoffman. Bridging from the series of studies, Canadian researchers explore collected retrospective narrative CPE accounts, and focus on the implications claimed by participants of the meaning and significance of CPEs in participants’ lives. Through the analysis of participant accounts, researchers identified several recurring themes that indicate possible life long impacts of CPEs such as vocational path, attitudinal/emotional orientation, sense of self and philosophical/religious orientation. The authors consider some of the implications for therapeutic work with children and youth, including integration of CPEs, their role in strength‐based approaches and as potential resources for intervention.

Rites of Passage: A Conversation on Becoming Adult

A renewed focus on rites of passage and particularly on the “coming of age” of adolescents is noticeable both within North America and beyond. In this article, three experienced youth workers engage in a conversation on a range of professional and research issues related to rites of passage and in the process try to come to grips with the meaning and significance of current youth and community trends. A dominant theme of the discussion is the need for adults to truly become and act as adults in order to assist young people to make a successful transition from childhood to adulthood.

Coming of Age as a Spiritual Task in Adolescence

This chapter offers a framework for understanding expressions of spiritual development in the behaviours and experiences of young adolescents (aged 10–15). Drawing loosely on the wisdom and models of rites of passage traditions, links are made between the deliberate communal coming of age ceremonial processes and the personal experiences of contemporary adolescents who are often left to accomplish the same developmental tasks in peer groups or in individual processes. Rites of passage included a deliberate acknowledgement of their spiritual significance and specific tasks, activities and means to insure appropriate spiritual education in a coming of age process. The communal absence of these rites now does not diminish adolescent attempts to come of age in spiritual terms.

Loss: the ultimate philosophical problem

This paper draws on Jan Zwicky’s claim in Lyric Philosophy that loss is the ultimate philosophical problem and Wittgenstein’s attitude to philosophy in his Culture and Value that: ‘philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition’. This paper will enter the difficult territory of loss using poetry and reflections to engage loss as a spiritual challenge and perhaps one of the major forces shaping cultural ways. Death inescapably brings loss into life for those who remain after a death but loss has many other forms and is a persistent experience in living that touches every stage of the life journey. It is a philosophical problem rooted in common human experience from childhood on that has been addressed in a multitude of forms, conceptualizations, rituals, belief systems and religions. As a method, poetry is a way of inquiry that allows one to enter experience and meet the intensity of events, particularly loss. In her essay ‘Entering the Bird Cage: Poetry and Perceptibility’, Jane Hirschfield says that poetry allows us ‘to understand the world beyond the narrow self’ and to do so ‘it is necessary to be available to the unknown’ and loss moves experience into the unknown.