A long and winding road: a personal journey from community education to spirituality via reflective practice.

Using an autoethnographic approach and drawing on principles of reflective practice, this paper illustrates how a long-standing professional involvement in community education evolved into a personal search for meaning that included engagement with the concept of spirituality. It re-views typologies of community education developed in the UK in the 1980s and argues that, when they are viewed holistically, a spiritual dimension is implicit in them. The paper suggests that spirituality needs to be addressed as a dimension of educational practice and research in order to keep pace with growing popular interests and emergent thinking in the natural sciences. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. (Frost 1920) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]