Spirituality and Culture in Health and Education Professions

Catalog description

This course focuses on the cultural aspects of spirituality and its place in the health and education professions. EDUC (HLHED) 582 Spirituality and Culture in Health and Education Professions (3)This course will focus on the examination of the place of the cultural aspects of spirituality and its place in the education and health professions and its implications for culturally responsive education and/or health care in a multicultural society. In particular the goals of the course are as follows: 1) To clarify the difference between spirituality and religion and to understand how spirituality is currently being examined in the fields of adult education, medical education and the health professions. 2) To examine how culture informs spirituality generally, and more specifically, to examine how culture relates to one's own spiritual development and overall health in the world. 3) To develop a sense of how people construct knowledge through image and symbol, which for many people, maps to their spirituality and culture, as they make new and deeper meaning of their own lives. 4) To begin to consider WHEN and HOW one might appropriately draw on one's own spirituality and that of participants in adult and higher educational practices and health care settings to increase cultural understanding and/or responsiveness to patient needs and when such discussion might seem to impose a spiritual or religious agenda. 5) To examine the connections among spirituality, culture, some complementary and alternative medicine modalities and overall holistic health and education.