Consultancy from the International Association for Children's Spirituality: Martin Ashley
This space provides brief details of practitioners and academics working in a variety of situations within the realm of Children's Spirituality. All are available for consultancy and can be contacted through this website.
Martin Ashley
Professor Martin Ashley is Director of the Centre for Learner Identity Studies and Head of Research in the Faculty of Education, Edge Hill University nr Liverpool, UK. His interest in spirituality is as a key dimension of learner identity - which is an holistic approach to who a learner perceives him or herself to be. It embraces also the literature of gender identity, generational identity, social class identity, geographical identity and ethnic identity and aims to view all of these things from the perspective of a unique individual, accessed through a humanistic phenomenological methodology which draws heavily upon biographical methods. In the words of an eleven year old boy “my spirituality is the unique me”.
Martin came to his present views on spirituality largely through his PhD, which examined children's values in relation to the natural world. Oscar Wilde's well known comment about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing describes as well as anything the quandary which led him to draw conceptual parallels between the pricelessness of a life, a beautiful sunset and a wonderful piece of music. Through an initial interest in how boys perceived the value of music, his post-doctoral work has drawn upon his earlier careers in sound recording and then music teaching to specialise in boys and singing. He has published widely on this topic with the aid of two large grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The spiritual dimension of music and how boys relate to this has been fundamental to his approach.
He is always delighted to talk about the relationship between masculinity and spirituality in the lives of young people, particularly where this involves singing, an area where he is increasingly sought after as a speaker. Other developing work within the Centre for Learner Identity Studies concerns transitional identities and virtual identities. The spiritual aspects of how a child transitions into an adolescent and how a school pupil transitions into a university student are topics he would welcome contact on, and he is particularly interested to collaborate in research on avatars - the spirituality behind on-line identities such as Second Life.
Further details of this work can be found at www.edgehill.ac.uk/clis/.