Peak Teaching: Exploring and Fostering Sacred Experiences in University Classrooms

Supporting the spiritual growth of college and university students with diverse backgrounds and orientations is both important and challenging. It is important not only because spirituality is a crucial dimension of human life but also because the majority of students at both private and public schools want their teachers to address spiritual issues in the classroom. A powerful way to address spirituality is to explore and foster sacred experiences in university classrooms. Sacred experiences include religious, spiritual, mystical, transcendent, numinous, and peak experiences as well as many other nonordinary experiences. The author offers guidance to educators on how to: 1) discern their own motivation, commitment, and preparedness for teaching sacred experiences; 2) support the diverse spiritual lives of their students as well as the inner lives of students who deny or are uncertain about the reality of spirituality and the sacred; 3) maintain the separation of church and state by developing an educational approach that is pluralistic, transformative, integrative, comparative, impartial, noncoercive, and dogma-free; 4) welcome multiple definitions, terminologies, descriptions, and perspectives on spirituality and the sacred, including those that doubt or deny its existence; 5) skillfully interweave holistic and conventional pedagogies that activate and integrate multiple modes of consciousness and being; 6) create a supportive learning environment for pluralistic discussions of the sacred; 7) cultivate epistemological humility; 8) pursue personal development, professional training, and lifelong learning; and 9) develop, experiment with, and conduct research on new pedagogies and combinations of pedagogies.