Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett's Mindful, Spiritual, and Student-Centered Pedagogy

While Moffett is most well-known for his enduring impact on writing education and language learning, the shift to spirituality and mindfulness halfway through his career changed his audience as he offered yet another pioneering and prescient educational approach to language and learning. However, this later change in emphasis has served to obscure the answer to the question “who is James Moffett and why does he matter to contemporary education?” because in many ways his career can be framed as having two distinct constellations of influence: on one side, the pedagogical, stretching from Teaching the Universe of Discourse in 1968, through Interaction (1973), Coming on Center (1981, 1988), Active Voice (1981, 1986, 1987), Detecting Growth (1992), and across the four editions of Student-Centered Language Arts (1968, 1976, 1983, 1992). And on the other side of his work, the spiritual, meditative, and mindful, commonly conceived of as beginning with Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation in 1982 (more on this later), through Storm in the Mountains (1988), and Harmonic Learning (1992). Moffett’s final book, The Universal Schoolhouse: Spiritual Awakening Through Education (1994), served as a capstone to his unique and complex career because it took up the task of merging the pedagogical with the spiritual, and also included a fierce critique of the political and commercial corruption of education in America.

Noting that “spiritualizing education does not require any religious indoctrination or moralistic preaching,” Moffett believed that the reluctance of educators to engage in more holistic approaches to education and development was the foremost threat to education in America (xix). To this end, Moffett called for the decentralization of educational administration in order to provide what he felt was much-needed space for the holistic enrichment of students that he went on to contend that our country, and world, may depend on. Moffett’s final book serves as his magnum opus because it synergized his wide array of concerns about education, learning, assessment, policy, spirituality and mindfulness into one synchronized model.

While The Universal Schoolhouse has been cited much less than Moffett’s other work, it may well be the key to understanding his full vision for education and language learning. Accordingly, this volume and this introduction both seek to use the whole of Moffett’s ever-evolving vision as a context from which to re-examine the many influences which led him down these two seemingly divergent but ultimately unified paths, and in doing so, to push forward a clearer understanding of the contemporary applicability of his ideas by accounting for the spiritual (or “cosmopolitan” as Moffett terms them) implications of pedagogical practice in general and language learning in particular

With educational reform and policy increasingly taking center stage in political and social discourse, along with drastic changes to how teaching and learning are perceived resulting from the tectonic shift to (and then back from) online learning vis a vis the COVID-19 pandemic, this is an important moment to reconsider—and advance Moffett’s vision for holistic and student-centered learning. Moffett’s contributions continue to hold value not only because he presaged much of the divisiveness in which we are now immersed (“Schools should not be political and commercial instruments” xiv), or because he himself lived through one of the earliest iterations of educational cancel culture in the Kanawha County protests of 1973 (Durst 114), but also, as we will see, because Moffett offered perhaps the most fulsome, sophisticated and nuanced plan for realizing, how “educational systems [can] sponsor the quest for the … meaning and purpose of life that underlies not only science, art, and philosophy but also the personal acts of everyday life” (xiv).

This essay seeks to answer three questions which rest at the fore of the inquiry into Moffett’s turn to the spiritual, meditative, and mindful:

• • How can Moffett’s life and career inform our understanding of his turn to spiritual and meditative work?
• • What are the general principles of his spiritual and meditative work?
• • How might we put these principles into practice in (and outside) the classroom and respond to the social and political challenges associated with doing so?

In the first section, this essay will attempt to outline the many important biographical events and influences which shaped the arc of Moffett’s career in order to surface and make sense of his turn to and the general principles of his spiritual and meditative work. More importantly, however, this section of the essay will also seek to demystify many of the common misunderstandings about Moffett’s turn to the spiritual and mindful and reframe what has commonly been perceived as a shift in focus as instead an extension of his early work that was at least in part fueled by the intense personal and professional trauma he endured as a result of the 1974 Interaction fiasco, and which led him to intentionally defy the mainstream in education for the rest of his career.

Then, in the second section, the essay will attempt to sketch the basic principles of Moffett’s spiritual and mindful theories by reviewing the development of his major works in this regard. In the final section, the essay will highlight how the chapters in this collection both fill in important biographical and historical context, take up the principles of his mindfulness and spirituality, and attempt to overcome the many social and political barriers which make their translation into functional classroom practices difficult. This account of Moffett’s career and his development as one of the first authorities on the spiritual and meditative aspects of education, to quote Moffett, is “meant to be utilized, not believed … [we] are after a strategic gain in concept” (Universe 15).