About Marian

Marian de Souza is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education, Australian Catholic University, Aquinas Campus, Ballarat campus. She teaches undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students.

Marian has conducted several funded and unfounded projects that have focused on the contemporary understandings of spirituality and have examined young people’s perceptions and expressions of their own spirituality. The findings of these studies have raised questions about how children and adolescents’ spirituality may be addressed in educational programs and environments. Most recently, Marian has been a research team member in the Australian Federal Government funded project into Values in Education. She has been published nationally and internationally on her research and was the Coordinating Editor of a 2-volume International Handbook on the Religious, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions in Education (2006) published by Springer. Marian is currently Coordinating Editor of another International Handbook on Education for Spirituality, Care and Wellbeing also to be published by Springer.

Drawing on current theories about emotional and spiritual intelligences, and on her own research findings, Marian has proposed a holistic curriculum approach that addresses the intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimensions in learning and teaching and in values education. She has been examining a multi-sensory learning process that involves perceiving, thinking, feeling and intuiting which should engage the mind, body, heart and soul of the student and the teacher. Such a learning process has the potential to result in deep levels of learning and teaching for meaning and connectedness. A further aspect of this learning approach has investigated the use of the arts to teach across the curriculum.

Marian’s other major research interest is focused on how ethnic communities hand on their spiritual and cultural heritage to their young in the pluralist context of contemporary Australia. Her current research is focused on examining the perceptions, experiences and practices of tolerance of young people in contemporary pluralist societies.

For more information about Marian's work, visit her web site at ACU National.