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94 Cultural Competence in Health Education and Health Promotion

to use the term spirituality to create experiences that people might connect to as
spiritual. Rather, by drawing on multiple ways of knowing, people might experience a
sense of wholeness through their own engagement and creativity; some might experi-
ence this as spiritual.

EDUCATING FOR HEALTH AND WHOLENESS IN CONTEXT
All those who educate for health and wholeness from a spiritually grounded and cultur-
ally responsive perspective do so in particular contexts. Some are health educators in
specific health education contexts as identified by the discipline. Others are educators

for health as health care providers or work more broadly in educating for health and
wholeness in other environments. As educators, we had occasion to work together with

a nonprofit organization in the community on the immigrant women ’ s health conference.
But more often we work in different contexts. Thus in this section we speak in separate
voices to describe what our spiritually grounded culturally responsive approaches to
educating for health and wellness look like in the contexts of our respective educational
practices. We invite health educators to explore their own personal spiritual and cultural
backgrounds, as these will have meaning for grounding their own practices.

Spiritually Grounded and Culturally Responsive Adult Education
Libby Tisdell
I currently teach in an adult education doctoral program, though I have occasion to do
workshops with adult learners in many contexts, including the immigrant women ’ s
health conference discussed earlier. All of my work as an adult educator in any context
is grounded in a belief in the importance of taking into account the multiple dimen-
sions through which people learn, including the spiritual, the cultural, the rational, the

affective, and the somatic dimensions. I attempt to find ways to address these elements
of learning, though it doesn ’ t necessarily mean that I overtly discuss all of them.
Rather, it means that I try to create activities that will touch on these dimensions.
Much of my work as an academic who works for the health of the society at large cen-
ters on teaching higher education classes about diversity and equity issues, and chal-
lenging systems of oppression based on race, culture, gender, or sexual orientation. I
learned in my early years of teaching diversity and equity courses that it is impossible
to really teach toward these goals by taking into account only rational modes of
thought. Indeed, people have intensely emotional experiences of oppression and privi-
lege based on race, culture, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation, and these
experiences affect who they are and how they think. Further, many people experience
recovering from these experiences and reclaiming parts of their oppressed identity in a
positive way as a spiritual experience, and they often speak about it as such. This is why
I eventually conducted a qualitative study exploring how spirituality informs the work
of thirty - one educators of different cultural groups engaging in culturally responsive
education in teaching classes about race, gender, or culture, and wrote a book about that
study (see Tisdell, 2003). The results are summarized in the assumptions about spiritu-
ality in use in this chapter.

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