Collaborating with students' spirituality.

Spirituality provides an opportunity for collaboration between school counselors and students around student diversity and development. North America in general and counseling in particular are now emerging from the limitations of worldviews that led to avoidance of spiritual topics. The biggest restriction of school counselor-student collaboration is the counselor's belief that a restriction exists.

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The word Gloom popped into my head, as Mark slumped into the chair across from me. Everything about him seemed dour. His clothing was dark and his brown hair was unkempt (not in the fashionable sense). Most noticeable, though, was the sagging, expressionless look of his face and the dullness in his eyes. I thought, "This kid looks depressed." I immediately knew that the mounds of paperwork and academic advising I had scheduled for the afternoon would get bumped.

Mark was depressed. His disclosures and, with his permission, the information provided by his mother about his behavior at home all suggested his being chronically unhappy.

Mark also said something that really stuck with me. When I asked directly if he was unhappy, he responded, "I'm not happy very often. Well, almost never. But I feel that God put me on earth for a special reason of some sort." I clarified, "You feel like you have a purpose for being here?.... Yes," he replied, "a special purpose." I asked, "Have you figured it out yet?" Mark answered, "Not yet. I'm waiting for that day to come." I knew about the crucial roles that external support systems play in students' lives (Aoki & Turk, 1997; Moos, Cronkite, & Moos, 1998), yet the internal support system of a spiritual belief was different for me. While my own spiritual beliefs were important to me, I did not really consider their place in the fives of the students with whom I worked.

This fictitious vignette (based on an actual incident from McWhirter, 1993) illustrates a common yet often overlooked resource for counselors and students: spirituality. For most of the history of counseling, spirituality has been ignored, discounted, or considered a source of clients' problems (Campbell, 1975; Ellis, 1980). However, researchers and clinicians have acknowledged spirituality as a core consideration in the lives of many people (Bergin, 1980; Jones, 1994). It follows, then, that omitting spirituality from any role in counseling might compromise the quality of services given to students. It is a dimension of human diversity that can no longer be overlooked.

As influential as spirituality might be, it is an aspect of human life that has not been well researched as such. Related aspects of religion and values have been researched a great deal, and these studies help counselors understand the probable effects of spirituality. For instance, most citizens of the United States say religion is important. A 44nation survey found that 50% of the people in the United States sample said one highly visible expression of spirituality, religion, was very important in their lives, one of the highest percentages in the survey (Albright et al., 2002). Other surveys have found that 80% to 90% of U.S. citizens believe in a spirituality that included a god or gods. The vast majority of these citizens espouse some form of Christianity (Steere, 1997). In the United States, then, spirituality in some form is a central consideration for most citizens; this is reasonably the case for K-12 students as well, since most are influenced by family and community values and religions (Bee & Boyd, 2003).

The probable impact of spirituality on school counseling is not yet a subject of concerted study. A related subject, values, has been researched and those findings could be most instructive about the influences of spirituality. More than 30 years ago, the research of Truax (1966) demonstrated that values of client-centered counselors influenced the "therapeutic relationship" and affected clients, even though the theory championed the importance of counselor neutrality or being nonjudgmental (Rogers, 1961). The influences of counselor values were especially demonstrated by how the counselors responded to issues the counselors thought were important. An example is the counselor nodding or saying, "Um hm," only when clients said something the counselor thought was important. After a while, the clients talked more about the topics to which the counselor responded, rather than the topics that might have been more important to the clients. More recently, researchers found how the values of counselors and clients often converged at least somewhat, especially in long-term relationships, with counselors' values usually exerting a greater influence than the clients' (Richards, Rector, & Tjeltveit, 1999; Sugarman & Martin, 1995; Tjeltveit, 1986). It appears that counselor neutrality around values laden issues, including spirituality, is an unfounded myth.

The implications of counselor influence on clients are huge. Considering the long-term contacts school counselors have with many students over 3 to 5 years--plus the developmentally sensitive processes of elementary and secondary students' identify formation including values (Bee & Boyd, 2003) and spirituality (Coles, 1990)--the potential for counselors' values influencing students' values at least somewhat is high.

Spirituality, religion, and values, of course, are not synonymous. They overlap. Spirituality contains numerous values and religion is one expression of spirituality. To the extent that counselors impart values, it is reasonable to deduce that they also affect spirituality at least to some extent. Since communication of counselor spirituality is almost inevitable, the issue at hand is not counselor neutrality. Instead, it is a matter of how aware counselors are of their own spirituality, however defined, and how they communicate it to students (Corey, Corey, & Callanan, 2003).

WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?

Given that spirituality is too big of an issue to ignore, it is important to address the phenomenon cogently and systematically. As such, the purposes of this article are fourfold. First, spirituality in general is considered. Second is a summary of various notions of spirituality and worldviews. Third, the place of spirituality as an aspect of diversity and development is examined. Fourth is a discussion of the practical implications for school counselors

The English word spirituality refers to spirit. The term spirit descends from the Latin verb, spirare, which means to breathe (American Heritage Dictionary, i985). Spirituality as a part of everyday life has been important to all civilizations (Smith, 2001). For example, in the classical societies of Greece and Rome, spirituality as religion had a central place. The Greeks and Romans had many gods whose responsibilities ranged from creation of the world to operations of the kitchen. This system changed in 312 A.D. when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and ruled that his religion was to be the religion of the empire (Tarnas, 1991). With the spread of Christianity in the Western hemisphere and its concept of the Holy Spirit, spirit and spirituality became associated with a religion (Armstrong, 1993). In contemporary North America, however, religion may take many forms, but each emphasizes meaning, deep relational bonds, transcendence of secular life, or mystery in religious experience (Sire, 1997). According to the American Counseling Association (ACA) "Summit on Spirituality" (1995):

   Spirituality is ... a capacity and tendency
   that is innate and unique to all persons. [It]
   moves the individual toward knowledge, love,
   meaning, hope, transcendence, connectedness,
   and compassion. Spirituality includes
   one's capacity for creativity, growth, and the
   development of a values system. Spirituality
   encompasses the religious, spiritual, and
   transpersonal. (p. 30)

Despite pronouncements by groups such as the ACA, a concept and experience as amorphous as spirituality is hard to define for everyone. Indeed, it is an aspect of life that is personally defined, especially in contemporary North America where individual meanings and choices are extremely important (MacDonald, 1997). Definition denotes an enduring, fixed understanding. Social constructionists, however, assert that no meanings are certain, that all meanings are personal and linked to the contexts of individuals' lives (Gergen, 2001; Sexton, 1997). While it is possible for a collection of individuals to choose to share an agreed-upon definition, personal nuances remain that can only be known to each person. Hence, part of the debate around including spirituality in counseling is its inherent ambiguity.

Spirituality, as a personally defined phenomenon, takes many forms (Anderson & Worthen, 1997; Aponte, 1998). Two general forms appear here: religious and secular. These two forms are used, since they are inclusive of more specific types.

The general term religion covers all of the various forms of organized worship. Worldwide forms such as Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are obvious examples. Each of these has a number of sects or denominations that differ from others within the same religion. Of course, many numerically smaller types of religions exist as well, such as Bahai or Gnosticism. Even though these groups are small, their adherents are as devoted to the spiritual beliefs of the religions as members of larger groups (Armstrong, 1993; Smith, 2001).

The second general form of spirituality is "secular" (i.e., pertaining to the natural world). Despite the religious traditions associated with spirituality, many counselors now regard it as spanning all experiences, whether sacred or secular. Smith (2001, p. 4) endorsed the notion of "God as a direction rather than an object. That direction is always toward the best that we can conceive...." In this sense, it is a general ecological impulse for relationship and connection that expresses itself in more formal religious forms and in more informal secular forms such as friendships, interest groups, and political positions (Brammer & MacDonald, 2003; Corey et al., 2003).

Whether counselors regard spirituality as religious or secular, it is a force that enters into counseling processes. How counselors come to grips with it has a lot to do with how they understand the world, their profession, and students. In other words, worldviews are key considerations with regards to spirituality and the work of the counselor. The story of how dominant worldviews evolved in the Western Hemisphere is also integral to the idea that spirituality and counseling practice could be and should be kept separate. Next, we explore this connection.

SPIRITUALITY AND EVOLVING WORLDVIEWS

Worldviews

A worldview is a conceptual schema through which an individual or group organizes and makes sense out of life (Ho, 1995; Sire, 1997; Trevino, 1996). People learn their worldviews through their dally life experiences, which occur within particular cultures and subcultures. Worldviews also operate at a conscious or unconscious level. At the conscious level, worldviews are expressed by and mediated through language (Fischer, Jome, & Atkinson, 1998). Unconscious worldviews are less obvious since they are usually not expressed linguistically. Since unconscious worldviews function outside of immediate awareness, they often affect a person's life in ways that are not always understood (e.g., ethnocentric views held by individuals who consider themselves to be ethnically neutral; MacDonald, 1991).

Spirituality is part of worldview. It is vital in seeking to understand and attribute meaning to the cosmos, life in general, and personal life. Artifacts of prehistoric peoples from 100,000 years ago suggest beliefs in an afterlife; life and what came after it seemed to have significance beyond finding shelter or the next meal (Joseph, 2001). Hence, spirituality has long been part of daily experiences. As odd as it may seem to mainstream North Americans, most of the world operates with spirituality inextricably as a part of dally worldview applications (Sue & Sue, 2003). That is, spiritual considerations cannot be partitioned out of daily events such as a career move or treatment for an illness. This was also the case in Western Europe and North America until approximately 300 hundred years ago (Smith, 2001).

Past worldviews that affect spirituality. In order to get to the place of thinking that spirituality as a part of worldview could be separated from the rest of life, a significant conceptual change was necessary. The possibility of a worldview of separation or dualism began with the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. His conceptualization of dualism or separation of mind, body, and spirit eventually set the basic worldview agenda for the Western Hemisphere. Plato's ideas influenced later Greek and Roman philosophers. They also guided the earliest major Christian theologians, including Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas (Stark, 2003; Tarnas, 1991).

The theologies of Augustine, Aquinas, and others guided the theocracies that became established in Europe, starting with the Emperor Constantine in 312. A Christianized culture dominated European life for more than a thousand years (Stark, 2003). This culture eventually influenced philosopher Rene Descartes (1641/1993). Among other ideas, Descartes asserted that the universe operated mechanistically, like a clock, with discrete parts that could be studied and manipulated separately. He also reaffirmed Plato's worldview of dualism or separation between the material world and what might be considered a spiritual world.

Worldviews, counseling, and spirituality. Between the mechanistic and dualistic worldviews, plus others that developed in western culture over the past 300 years, a number of beliefs grew that have implications for spirituality and school counselors. Regarding people as machines, for example, meant that it was possible to not only separate the spiritual and the secular, but it was also possible to think of humans as made up of discrete parts. When a physical, emotional, cognitive, or behavioral part became "broken," treatment entailed fixing that dysfunctional part of the machine in isolation. Therefore, an aggressive student might simply be required to attend anger management training, rather than also addressing the student's learning disabilities, chemical abuse, parental modeling of aggression, and media depictions of aggression as a primary means of problem solving. In addition to merely looking at parts, dualism allowed explanations for brokenness and interventions that drew entirely upon secular or naturalistic causes or upon wholly supernatural causes. The former came to be called "science," while the latter came to be called "superstition" (Sagan, 1996; Tarnas, 1991).

The influence of naturalistic explanations of and interventions for maladies grew as science and technology improved. Supernatural attributions declined because they did not fulfill the criteria set by the widely accepted naturalism. At the same time, the separation introduced between secular and sacred expanded into a rift, as scientists and church hierarchies increasingly competed for control of the worldviews that would direct the nations (Sire, 1997; Smith, 2001; Sobel, 2000; Tarnas, 1991).

A schism between science and the Christian church became quite pronounced by the middle of the 1800s. The worldview that only naturalistic explanations were "acceptable" became more deeply entrenched in one of the forbearers to counseling when psychology split off from philosophy and declared that only naturalistic and physically proven explanations were acceptable (Leahey, 2001; Viney & King, 2003). That is, spiritual and philosophical explanations were disallowed by the infant psychology.

General culture and society came to accept mechanistic and dualistic worldviews as givens. Such worldviews comprise central elements of what has popularly come to be called modernism. This is the overarching worldview under which traditional school curricula have been organized and under which school staff, including counselors, have been raised and educated. The modernistic worldview has become so widely, unconsciously, and uncritically accepted that it seems natural (Smith, 2001).

One of the outcomes of the dominant worldview was eschewing spirituality as an essential dimension in human life. Part of the context, as mentioned earlier, was a mistaken belief that counseling could be conducted in a neutral manner. Thus, the traditional stance of counselors was to overlook student spirituality. The marginalization of spirituality appeared in counseling theories, methods, and counselor education; by the 1970s, it was complete (Campbell, 1975).

Worldviews in transition. The walls of modernism began to crack and sag, however, as its limitations became more and more apparent. Despite eloquent efforts by advocates such as Sagan (1996) and Wilson (1998) to defend its virtues, it is now clear that modernistic worldviews, while helpful, are incomplete.

The most visible present critique of modernity is post modernism. Its many advocates have pointedly highlighted limitations of modernism (Gergen, 2001; Sexton, 1997). The movement has become widespread in education, humanities, social sciences, and theology, where applications of modernistic worldviews and methods have been unsatisfying (Forster, 1997). Other models, though, are coming forward that seemingly will assimilate and supercede modernism and post modernism.

Led by physical sciences which had espoused modernism into the early 1900s, more complex and dynamic models than either modernism or post modernism emerged. General System Theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968), Chaos Theory (Gleick, 1987; Lorenz, 1993), Complexity Theory (Mainzer, 1994; Wolfram, 2002), and String Theory (Greene, 1999) exemplify systematic efforts to construct new ways of thinking about the universe, life, and science. The vast majority of these efforts are currently in physics, but applications are just beginning in the social sciences, as discussed by Barton (1994) in psychology, Guttman (1991) in family therapy, and Carns and Carns (1997) in school counseling.

It is beyond the scope of this article to expound upon each of the possible successors to modernism. They share a number of features, however, that pertain to spirituality and school counseling:

* Animate and inanimate entities continually relate with each other and affect each other. Nothing functions in isolation.

* Relationships between entities are dynamical or always changing. Many relationships are predictable as probabilities of occurrence (e.g., a newborn being female or male, overall helpfulness of counseling), albeit some are very low in predictability (e.g., outcomes of a specific counseling method with a particular student).

* Relationships entail distinct individuals with their idiosyncrasies and the linkages with their whole environment, including other people. The particular and the whole cannot be meaningfully separated without altering both.

* Some of these dynamical relationships are empirically demonstrable yet many of them transcend conventional models and methods of measurement (e.g., the universe may consist of ten or more dimensions rather than three; Greene, 1999).

* Some dynamics function out of the relationships themselves rather than out of the properties of the entities involved in the relationships (e.g., the function of a catalyst in a chemical reaction) and are difficult to demonstrate empirically.

The upshot is that forces in a dynamical, interconnected universe may or may not be empirically demonstrable or reliably predictable, yet they cannot be discounted only because of their transcendent nature. Perhaps, as Stark (2003) noted, this is why a greater percentage of physical scientists espouse some sort of spirituality than social scientists. The former understand from theory and research that because phenomena or experiences cannot be readily explained in naturalistic terms, it does not hold that the phenomena or experiences do not exist. In this context, then, optimal person-to-person relations, including those in school settings, consider the whole of human diversity, including what an individual regards as spiritual and transcendent.

SPIRITUALITY AS PART OF STUDENT DIVERSITY AND DEVELOPMENT

The preamble of the Ethical Standards for School Counselors (ASCA, 1998) includes this tenet:

      Each person has the tight to respect and
   dignity as a human being and to counseling
   services without prejudice as to person, character,
   belief or practice, regardless of age,
   color, disability, ethnic group, gender, race,
   religion, sexual orientation, marital status, or
   socioeconomic status.

Clearly, awareness of and respect for diversity is essential to the American School Counselor Association. As used here, the term spirituality is at least implicit in the ASCA ethical tenet on diversity, especially in terms of beliefs and religion.

Development is a life-long process that includes diversity and spirituality. The research of Fowler (1981) described spiritual development in the same manner of stages as Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget. Taking into account the profusion of changes students go through during their kindergarten through senior years of school, understanding how they navigate those changes is imperative for school counselors (Muro & Kottman, 1995). Spiritual issues factor into identify formation for adolescents (Wagner, 1996) and for children (Shiner, 1998), making them important developmentally as well as in terms of diversity.

History is a developmental consideration that is often overlooked: history of the individual, history of the person's family, and history of the broader social context (i.e., neighborhood, educational and work environments, region, nation). Carter and McGoldrick (1999) and McGoldrick and Giordano (1996) delineated how historical dynamics affected everyday life, including how people grow up. Thus, students are influenced by their personal histories, histories of their families, and histories of their cultures.

History tends to influence contemporary worldviews unconsciously, since familial and/or societal beliefs and practices are often communicated in subtle ways for years to centuries. For instance, the gold wedding ring began as a sacred symbol in Egypt approximately 4,800 years ago; having no beginning or no end, the circular shape was to represent eternal marriage, even after death (Panati, 1996). The polytheistic Druids believed that tangled groves of trees, especially in hollows, were preferred dwelling places for deities (Webster, 1995). The phrase "Knock on wood" probably originated to denote how to evoke the god(s) inside the trees. Today, the phrase preserves some of that meaning as a wish for luck. Such examples of origins of contemporary practices suggest how spiritual meanings and practices pass from generation to generation and continue to influence daily lives, even when those origins are lost in antiquity. The effective counselor, then, takes student histories into account, relative to the issues presented by the students.

Diversity and development, including history, afford many opportunities for counselors to assist students, and spirituality as diversity plus development provides another important opportunity. The counselor in the story at the start of this article heard all of what Mark, the student, shared. Presumably, the counselor applied knowledge about diversity and development in relation to Mark as an individual and as part of the significant contexts of his life.

What the counselor took in included hearing that Mark's affinity with something spiritual provided the student a stable resource that could see him through chronically difficult circumstances. The counselor could have asked Mark to share more about how his spiritual beliefs were helpful and how he had learned to apply them (e.g., historical developmental influences through modeling by his mother and a friend).

None of this might have surfaced, though, without an effective counseling process that took into account the student's development, including his spiritual history. The following section is an exploration of various implications of the foregoing to the day-to-day practice of school counselors.

IMPLICATIONS FOR SCHOOL COUNSELING

School counseling has come a long way since its inception. As more is learned about human behaviors, emotions, cognitions, and interactions, a greatly varied and complex picture of a student's ecology emerges. Perhaps it is a matter of timing that the profession is now ready to address the subtle intricacies embedded in spirituality. In order to do so, research and school practice must move beyond relatively static worldviews and incorporate interactive worldviews.

An example of a traditional approach to counseling that has always incorporated interactive worldviews is that of Adler's individual psychology (Mosak, 2000). From its beginning, Adler's approach to counseling focused on social interaction. Because an individual psychology approach emphases an understanding of human interactions, it is quite applicable to school settings (e.g., Kottman & Johnson, 1993; Muro & Kottman, 1995). Issues of status and power between students and teachers illustrate Adlerian interactive themes. Closer to the subject of this article, Wittmer and Sweeney (1992) developed an Adlerian model of personality that incorporates diverse aspects of human experience and has spirituality and self-regulation at the core of the person.

Like Adler's theory, systemic models of psychotherapy and counseling (e.g., Solution-Focus Therapy, Structural Therapy) are also interactive. The worldviews through which they operate are dynamic, inasmuch as on-going relationships are the primary foci for assessment and intervention (Guttman, 1991). Some counselors think that systemic models are applicable only to family or marital counseling, but authors such as Adams, Ryan, Ketsetzis, and Keating (2000) and Cams and Carns (1997) demonstrated their application to school counseling as well. The research of Adams et al., for example, established that elementary students' sociability with peers and adherence to school rules were closely linked to habitual patterns of interactions in their respective families.

Even though interactive counseling models might help in relating to students' spirituality, school counselors who use any model optimally serve students when they allow the students to express all of themselves, including their spirituality. Counselor receptivity requires no new or special skills. The counselor in the tale about Mark displayed the same essential capabilities that all counselor education programs cover--relationship development, questioning, listening, clarifying, assessment, and hypothesis formation. Spirituality was one of several issues raised by Mark, and it was embedded in depressed affect. To the extent that counselors are aware of spirituality as part of students' diversity and development and open to learning from students how their own spirituality functions in their lives, they may effectively use skills that facilitate any other conversations they might have with students.

Counselor education programs typically attend to diversity and development issues in a variety of ways. More often than not, for example, these matters are addressed throughout the curriculum, especially in multicultural and/or developmental courses (Rooney, Flores, & Mercier, 1998). Since the early 1990s, preparation programs are increasingly adding spirituality into their diversity or developmental curricula. Surveys on counseling (Pate & High, 1995), counseling psychology (Schulte, Skinner, & Claiborn, 2002), and clinical psychology (Brawer, Handal, Fabricatore, Roberts, & Wajda-Johnston, 2002) document these increases. Together, the three surveys suggest that spirituality, tends to be treated as a factor of diversity, with religion given little consideration. Numerous respondents to Shulte et al. also indicated openness to research on spiritual topics, which raises the prospect of continuing inclusion in at least some programs.

It appears, then, that present and future school counselors will be prepared to address at least generic matters of spirituality. Basic skills are already in place. General and specific conceptual models are emerging. Many graduate programs acknowledge the place of spiritual issues in the repertoire of professional counselors.

CONCLUSION

Conflict between student spirituality and counselor functioning is not inevitable nor is it necessary. One potential impediment to school counseling is external to the process: ethical or legal restrictions. While public school counselors are understandably sensitive to matters around separation of church and state, openness to students' spirituality does not compromise this legal principle (Fischer & Sorenson, 1996). Of course, counselors cannot ethically or legally proselytize for a certain point-of-view on spirituality or even introduce spirituality in general as an issue students ought to consider (ASCA, 1998, Section A.1.c). No external regulations, however, prohibit counselors from facilitating discussions about spiritual matters that students raise or even addressing it as part of students' diversity and development as long as it is germane to the student issues being addressed (Brammer & MacDonald, 2003; Corey et al., 2003).

The other potential impediment is internal to counselors. Restrictive attitudes of school counselors about spirituality and avoidance of the topic will interfere with students' attempts to explore this aspect of their lives, if counselors let it. Worldviews that evolved over two millennia make it seem natural that spirituality could and should be excluded from consideration. Yet many students include spiritual issues in their life choices and changes. Excluding this part of diversity and development could render a truncated counseling experience that belies the aim of serving the welfare of students (ASCA, 1998, Section A.1.a, A.1.b).

Spirituality as part of conventional school counseling seems to be on the horizon. Worldviews appear to be slowly shifting, counseling models are coming forward, counseling skills already exist, and counselor education programs are becoming more inclusive of the issue. How this additional opportunity to collaborate with students plays out in the future remains to be learned.

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Don MacDonald, Ph.D., is a professor of Psychology, Family, and Community, Seattle Pacific University, WA. E-mail: [e-mail]

Many thanks to Claudia Grauf-Grounds and the PSC reviewers for their insights on the development of this paper.