A sampling of Diana’s poetry:
wind slide
Where have
the winds
gone?
stunned
by a fierce sun
they follow
the course
of stone
we have lost
our way
the sirens
lurk
their veiled skins
sleek bodies
rubbed raw
in a black rain
make me remember
your wings
like the frail
strands of summer
translucent
shouting praises
of green
thrust to a
final sky
Denton, D. (2011). Betrayals of gravity: The flight of the phoenix.
Qualitative Inquiry, 17(1). p. 89.
A sampling of Diana’s academic articles:
Betrayals of Gravity: The Flight of the Phoenix
The author witnesses the creation and eventual dissolution of the fragile institutional structures that have held her in place. Surrounded by dissonant choirs of institutional tension, broken trust, conflicted agendas, she finds herself moving through fractured and polarized spaces in the academy. Amidst the rubble of her own institutional life, the poetic voice calls her to look through images of rupture to other fragile landscapes in the throes of disruption. She bridges these worlds to make sense of her own and the larger more-than-human landscape.
In Qualitative Inquiry 17 (1), (2011):85-92
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077800410389757
Toward a Sacred Discourse: Reconceptualizing the Heart Through Metaphor
In this article, the author takes as her subject the lived experience of the Heart. She presents an autoethnographic case to examine the regions of spiritual inquiry and discourses of the sacred. In mystical traditions, the Heart is often conceptualized as a site of liberation or enlightenment. Entering this inner territory of the Heart through the tacit knowledge of poetics and the body, the author explores how a metaphoric turn in her research illumined a Heart practice and discourse, how somatic images became a bridge to lived experience. She discusses how mining three concrete metaphors, evoked by a set of experiences in the field, moved her study of the Heart. The field in which this project is situated has three dimensions: the author’s poetry, lived experience, and images and conversations arising in her teaching practice.
In Qualitative Inquiry Vol. 11, No. 5 (2005): 752-770.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077800405275055
Fostering Spiritual Depth in a Trans-traditional Context: Communicating Across Differences
In this article, the author explores experiential strategies as a way of entering the conversation of spirituality and pedagogy. From an experiential ground she helps to deepen and widen the dialogue, to restore authenticity and wholeness to the learning experience. Exploring spirituality as that dimension of human life that gives meaning and inspires understanding, she wonders how to integrate experiential modalities into the curriculum. To this end, she invited university students (from diverse backgrounds) to participate in ten 2 ½ hour videotaped workshop sessions over a six-month period. The objective of the workshop series was to explore and experience trans-traditional community with an eye to understanding how to integrate experiential strategies into a course on spirituality. In the experiential focus personal practices enter into the search. Through direct experience students make contact with the deeper ground of the sacred. This approach acknowledges that full understanding and appreciation are derived from firsthand personal experience.
In Religion and Education Vo. 31, No. 1 (2004): 20-45.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15507394.2004.10012331
The Very Idea of Conflict: Working With Image and Metaphor in a Re-visioning of Conflict
This article describes a study exploring how our understanding of conflict can be transformed by examining the images and metaphors we use to conceptualize it. The study, drawing from phenomenological and hermeneutic perspectives, suggests that by moving away from limiting metaphors and embracing new images, individuals can foster a more nuanced and constructive approach to conflict, particularly in organizational settings
In Imagination, Cognition And personality: Consciousness in Theory, Research, Clinical Practice. Vol. 22, No.1 (2003): 41-53.
A sampling of Diana’s book chapters:
Tensions of Maternity
The authors deconstruct the ‘masks’ and conventions of maternity through performative and rememorying inquiry. The nature of this autoethnographic enterprise demands an innovative methodology – performative enquiry – and enquiry enhanced and deepened by the choral repetitions of both authors. Writing and reading in a collaged patchwork of letters, prose, poems, and diary entries become part of the process and space of multiple performances of the maternal, and the reading experience echoes that interruptive enquiry.
(co-authored with Steve Ryder) In Performing Maternities: Political, Social and Feminist Enquiry, edited by Kate Aughterson and Jess Moriarty, Bristol, UK/Chicago, USA, Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Transformative Pathways: Engaging the Heart in Contemplative Education
In this chapter, through metaphoric innovation and a poetic sensibility, I deepen my phenomenology/pedagogy of the Heart. Engaging the Heart as both inner method and attainment, I ask how insights and practices of the Heart might continue to expand a contemplative pedagogy and perspective. How is the awakened Heart embodied within self, relationship and community? I take as my starting point, the metaphors of the Heart that have informed my understandings of the inner world of the self. As a teacher and scholar of communication, I extend these metaphors from the world of the intrapersonal to the circles of relationship that we collectively embody – the realms of the interpersonal.
In Contemplative Learning and Inquiry Across Disciplines, edited by Olen Gunnlaugson, Edward W. Sarath, et al. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2014.
Re-Imagining the Wound: Of Innocence, Sacrifice & Gift
This chapter explores the emotional wound as an entry point to spirit. The wound is a puncturing of the feeling body. It offers an intensification of feeling, an immediate pain. In the immediacy of the wound we are pulled into spaces of vulnerability and opening. The woundings of the Heart “moments of loss, rejection, trauma, physical and emotional pain…have a profound effect on our consciousness – shifting our psychological boundaries” (Denton, 2004, p. 143). They inform a pedagogy and practice of the Heart. I catalyze this exploration through poetic narrative and metaphoric innovation as I attend to the notion of the wound as a site of innocence, sacrifice, and gift. Listening to the wound I contemplate the whispers of spirit that prod my sensational awareness - awakening, stirring and enlivening affective and intuitive responsiveness and being.
In Spirituality, Ethnography & Teaching: Stories from Within, edited by Will Ashton & Diana Denton, New York, NY, Peter Lang, 2006.
Towards a Pedagogy of Compassion
This chapter draws on three workshops presented at the Holistic Learning Conference : Breaking New Ground since its inception in 1997. Developing applications of my theoretical work on the phenomenology of the Heart (Denton, 1996), each of these presentations offered opportunities for a reflexive exploration of the experience of the Heart (both conceptual and somatic) through contemplative and imaginative practice. Each workshop addressed the primal question of my original research: how can I create the conditions for continually eliciting the kinds of ways of being in the world that I identify and describe in my study? Together with my workshop participants, I explored ways to integrate Heart knowledge and experience with educational practice. In this current chapter, I investigate how awakening the Heart can be encouraged and guided through avenues of personal experience, imagery and the evocation and exchange of learner responses. Engaging the Heart as both inner method and attainment, as both practice and realization, I ask of myself and others how our sense of the awakened Heart is embodied?
In Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education: Breaking New Ground, edited by Jack Miller, Selia Karsten, Diana Denton, et al. Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2005.
The Heart’s Geography: Compassion as Practice
In the tantric tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, the state of spiritual liberation is described as hrdayangamibhuta – to become something that moves in the Heart. The guru or teacher’s role is to awaken the light of the Heart – the flame that melts the constrictions of consciousness - with her own inner light. This chapter explores the role of the spiritual teacher, as a source of inspiration and presence, in facilitating this lightening, this movement of the Heart. The author considers her own experience of the Heart that moves and how this has influenced her pedagogical practice.
In Spirituality, Action and Pedagogy: Teaching from the Heart, edited by Diana Denton and Will Ashton, New York, NY, Peter Lang, 2004.
The Art of Contemplative Listening
This chapter explores what the author describes as contemplative listening. Contemplative listening is two-fold – learning to listen to the inner voice of the self and learning to listen to another. Self or inner listening is an invitation to stillness, to attend to the gift of the moment, to question, to listen to the small still voice of the self. Listening inwardly is a listening from the Heart – with compassion and care. Listening contemplatively to another invites us into a sacred communion. We need to breathe into this space, allowing the words of the other to touch us with intention and grace. We need to welcome the gift of their presence with the gift of our own.
In Spirituality in a Diverse Society, edited by Robert Forman, Diana Denton, Doug Krushke & Peter Laurence. New York, Forge Institute, 2004.
