This story was submitted by a member of the Spiritual Changemakers Community.

As a teenager, I struggled with a few fundamental questions: Who am I? How do I deal with and understand life and my experience? On what basis do I figure out what to do with my life? As those questions started to arise in me, I felt unequipped to address them, which created a feeling of disconnect, isolation, and unhealthy confusion about my life. All I could do was follow society’s dictate for what I should do—go to college—and go from there.

At first, I was excited about college as I had a general feeling of searching and wanting to learn, which I now can see was understanding who I was. I first got excited about psychology, but in a class where we were examining the behavior of rats, I realized this field would not give me the answers I was seeking. Since Philosophy seemed about understanding life, I became inspired to seek there. Something felt missing there, too. It had nothing to do with my own human experience and was only about the ideas. And finally, my search went toward sociology, where I experienced a little more connection to my humanity. Still, the science of social behavior did not touch on the more direct need I had to make sense of my life.

The questions I had were spiritual—questions that are not resolved by helping students develop social-emotional skills or even by practicing mindfulness. After being a middle school teacher, a social worker, and a seeker on a long journey to make sense of life, I felt pieces of a puzzle coming together. Soon after marriage (an important piece to the puzzle), Francesca and I worked for four years intimately with students, teachers, and principals to create a curriculum and approach to support students with these fundamental questions about life…thus, The QUESTion Project was born. We train teachers in public high schools to teach a semester-long daily class where students engage with some of the most important questions about life. Unlike my university courses, which left my humanity out of the exploration, The QUESTion Class and teacher training are designed to engage our humanity along with the intellectual rigor of tackling questions that don’t have fixed or final answers.

The QUESTion Class provides a space not only for students to engage and connect with their own humanity but also with each other. It is a rare space where students can hear and witness what their peers really think about life, their inner thoughts, and how they relate to their experiences. I’ve come to see this as a foundation for democracy because an important way to break down the false barriers between ourselves and others is through experiencing each other’s humanity. If this does not happen in the students’ educational journeys, then something fundamental is missing (as it was in my own education, even though I had the privilege of attending some of the best schools).

Our aim is that the QUESTion project demonstrates the possibility of addressing this foundational piece in a very direct and substantive way. We see this as a building block to help catalyze a subject field that places students’ humanity at the center of the learning process. Building blocks of this field will include theoretical insights about effective approaches and applications that demonstrate results (we recently received a report from a study by Stanford University on our project). Our lives are dedicated to contributing all we can to this.