ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways non-Westerners and Westerners understand their relationship with other humans and the natural world. The author explores the intersection of autobiographical story telling and postmodern forms of ecological theory. Noting the historical work that makes her scholarship possible, the author turns toward a description of prior work, such as the writing of Huebner that made discussions of the spirit in education possible. The author turns to an autobiographical exploration of coming to understand spirituality and ecology as relational and therefore something larger than a human project. Next she explores the language of spirituality and language of place within curriculum studies. She suggests language is a key site for sharing knowledge across generations and therefore constitutes a “commons” or public space. Providing a description of her own commons, the author points to relational and process epistemologies for offering a view of knowledge that makes significant place and time, ones within which thought and understanding are made available for living. Lastly, she outlines an ecological perspective that accounts for provisional truths relative to the scale of circumstance and context, the way language shapes available thought, and how self is made in relationship with place.
