This type of approach also models for teachers our understanding of the connection between the work of CSE and preparing students to inherit democracy. Nurturing one’s innate spirituality also forms one’s civic outlook and cultivates one’s civic engagement: if we recognize our inherent interconnection, that cannot but inform and transform the ways in which we engage in our communities. By creating an environment in which people are members of a community, we are establishing a space in which they can practice the type of society we aim to create, modeling such a process which schools could emulate. In this way, through modeling, we can show through experience the link between a spiritually supportive school culture and civic engagement.  

The Awakened Schools Institute is where the research of CSE comes to life. Through professional development for educators, our goal is to work alongside educators in public and public and independent schools in designing an Awakened school culture. 

Teacher education is at its best when new ways of teaching or leading are modeled. Showing people what spiritually supportive education is, rather than just telling them what it is, speaks to the lived experience of teaching and learning in deeper and more lasting ways.  By cultivating our own spiritually supportive professional development environment, we will be accessing and nurturing teachers’ own innate spirituality, nourishing them in ways that are so needed now and allowing them to experience how transformative and meaningful spiritually supportive education can be.

The objectives of the Awakened Schools Institute are:

1. Support educators in grounding their professional practice in their own spiritual lives, reconnecting with inner wisdom in a way that is inclusive, constitutional, and non-coercive.
2. Help teachers rediscover the original purpose, passion, and calling that brought them into education, restoring a sense of joy, meaning, and vocation.
3. Deepen educators’ understanding of spirituality in education, linking evidence-based spiritual development to their personal reasons for becoming teahcers.
4. Reawaken a shared, spiritually supportive approach to schooling, empowering educators – collectively and individually – to transform school culture by returning to who they hoped to be as teachers and sustaining that shift together.