Mindfulness:
Foundation for Teaching and Learning

The Sixth Annual Mindfulness in Education Network Conference

March 15-17, 2013

Lesley University, Cambridge MA

Program of Events:

Friday, March 15: Courageous Schools: Teaching and Leading in Tough Times

Friday evening, March 15: Keynote Address from Arthur Zajonc, "The Heart of Education"

Saturday, March 16: Mindfulness in Education Symposium

Sunday, March 17: A Day of Mindfulness: Alive and Awake

Mindfulness meditation has been practiced for thousands of years as a way to reduce suffering and cultivate inner peace. Research shows that mindfulness also enhances learning and attention. There is growing interest in the possibility that this ancient meditative practice can support education and learning for both children and adults. Many educational institutions, including UCLA, Stanford, UCSF, and PENN have embraced mindfulness as an educational intervention by introducing it into their curricula and conducting research in the field. This three-day event will explore the uses of mindfulness in education.

To register or for more information, see http://www.mindfuled.org

Creating a Mindful Campus: Investigating Boundaries

March 22 - 24, 2013

Wilma M. Sherrill Center, UNC Asheville

Building on last year's successful Creating a Mindful Campus retreat, this year's retreat will explore ways of adapting a variety of contemplative practices for use in our classrooms, throughout campus, and in the community. Focusing on the theme of boundaries (self/other, mind/body, campus/community, and others), we will have a chance to experience extended periods of contemplative practice, including sitting and walking meditation, mindful dialogue, mindful eating, reflective writing, and yoga. We will also have the opportunity to engage in a mindful service project carried out in coordination with UNC Asheville landscaping and grounds crew. The retreat is open to faculty, students, staff, K-12 educators, and interested members of the community.

We are fortunate that Daniel Barbezat, Executive Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society/The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, will present a keynote interactive presentation on contemplative higher education on Friday evening. He will join us throughout the retreat and will be available for individual consultations.

The retreat will begin on Friday, March 22, 2013 at 4 p.m. and will conclude on Sunday, March 24, 2013 at noon. 

A detailed schedule for the retreat will be available soon. In the meantime, if you have questions you may contact any member of the planning committee:

Summer Institute in Contemplative Environmental Studies: 
Pedagogy for Self and Planet

A workshop/retreat for professors

July 28-August 3, 2013

Lama Foundation, New Mexico

How can higher education best address environmental challenges? How can we most skillfully teach environmental studies with optimism and a sober sense of ecological realities?

This workshop focuses on the role of contemplation in environmental education. It explores the relationship between teaching environmental studies and cultivating our inner lives. Through scholarly discussions, artistic exercises, and regular contemplative practice (meditation, yoga, journaling, and nature walks), participants will investigate ways to deepen their teaching and enrich their lives at this historic moment of environmental intensification.

Part workshop and part retreat, this 6-day summer institute provides an opportunity to step back from the frenetic pace of our lives, and develop pedagogical tools and cultivate inner resources for engaging environmental education on a fragile and wild planet.

The Institute will take place at the Lama Foundation in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Lama is an off-grid, eco-laboratory committed to sustainable and mindful living. It is surrounded by the 1.5 million-acre Carson National Forest and draws its power from the sun, water from a spring, and much of its food in the summer directly from the garden. Prior to the year Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now under its ponderosa pines, it has served as retreat center to explore the relationship between one's inner life and outer engagements.

Faculty:

• Daniel Barbezat, Professor of Economics, Amherst College, and Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
• Michelle McCauley, Professor of Psychology, Middlebury College.
• Nicole Salimbene, visual artist whose work explores intimacy and sustainability.
• Paul Wapner, Professor of Global Environmental Politics at American University, and author of Living Through the End of Nature and Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics.
• Jeff Warren, Meditation Instructor and author of Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness.

More Information is available on the program website: http://www.american.edu/sis/gep/Contemplative-Environmental-Studies-Workshop.cfm  

Wanting: Teaching Economics with Contemplative Methods 

A Webinar with Daniel Barbezat, Professor of Economics, Amherst College
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
3:00 - 4:00 pm EST

free registration; open to all

Economics is often defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources. But "scarcity" doesn't simply exist: it is produced by the interaction of our wanting and what exists or is produced, viz. the interaction of demand and supply. Hence, the fundamental economic problem is the management of the tension between what is produced and our desiring, our wanting. At the core of the study of economics and the systems that arise from it is an inquiry into the nature of our wanting.

At any moment, we have many, many wants. Slowing down and realizing this can be a bit overwhelming. In fact, our wants often arise as thoughts or feelings do; they simply arise. If we embark on the enterprise to achieve well-being by satisfying wants simply as they arise, we are destined to fail. Our many wants contradict one another and often hardly seem our own. In a strict way, we will never fully get what we want. (See? "Dismal science" is not such a bad moniker!) Framed in this light, it is rather easy to see that this is not a situation produced by economic systems; rather, it is a fundamental human problem, best discerned by the combination of direct, personal inquiry and theoretical, analytic thinking.

In this Webinar, Professor Barbezat engages in this inquiry with examples from his Amherst College course "Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness." First-person based exercises on this subject are especially poignant for students, as they can directly discover the impact of their own wanting, how it affects their own economic decisions and the markets around them.

Daniel Barbezat is Professor of Economics at Amherst College. He has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University and Yale University and has taught in the summer program at Harvard University. In 2004, he won the J. T. Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching Economic History from the Economic History Association. 

Over the past decade, he has become interested in how self-awareness and introspection can be used in post-secondary education, economic decision-making and creating and sustaining well-being. With the support of a Contemplative Practice Fellowship in 2008, he has developed courses that integrate contemplative exercises designed to enable students to gain deeper understanding and insight. His approach to these economic classes has been featured in the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report, and on the NPR program "Here & Now."

Since 2009, he has worked with the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society as a Board Member, Treasurer and Associate Director of the Academic Program. In 2012, he became the Executive Director of the Center. He is actively working to expand and deepen programs, making the Center's work more accessible and transformative for all.

Along with his experimental research on choice and awareness, he is currently editing a group of papers on examples of contemplative pedagogy across the disciplines with Arthur Zajonc to be published by Routledge, co-writing a book with Mirabai Bush on contemplative pedagogy to be published by Jossey-Bass, and writing (and thinking, thinking, thinking about...) a book entitled Wanting.

Contemplative Practice Fellow David Haskell was featured in "Finding Zen in a Patch of Nature," an article by James Gorman published October 22, 2012 in the New York Times Science Section.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/science/david-haskell-finds-biology-zen-in-a-patch-of-nature.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Daniel Barbezat and Allison Pingree contributed "Contemplative Pedagogy: The Special Role of Teaching and Learning Centers" to To Improve the Academy, a Jossey-Bass publication for the Professional and Organizational Development Network (POD). 

View/download the .pdf or visit http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118257812.html for more information.

A conversation with Daniel Barbezat of Amherst College and Alexios Moore, Xavier University, on teaching, learning and contemplative pedagogy was the subject of the "Teaching Learning and Everything Else" podcast posted on November 27, 2012:

 Conversation #17: Contemplative Pedagogy.

Two New Brown University Contemplative Studies Research Studies

  1. School-based mindfulness training (Roth's Integrated Contemplative Pedagogy) improves body awareness, negative self-evaluation and anxiety in college women in comparison to an active control group of music training. The first and second authors of this paper are Contemplative Studies students.

View/download the .pdf

visit www.brittonlab.com  
visit www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/content/73/9/817.abstract 

2. School-based mindfulness training (Roth's Integrated Contemplative Pedagogy) improves memory recall for positive words in comparison to music training. Increased positive words recall was associated with increases in wellbeing and decreased depressing and anxiety.  The first three authors of this paper are Contemplative Studies students.

View/download the .pdf

visit www.brittonlab.com

visit www.frontiersin.org/Human_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00015/abstract 

Maria Lai-ling Lam announces the publication of two articles. 

"An Educator as a Contemplative Practitioner in Business Education" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice (ISSN# 2158-3595). It will be published in volume 13(2), 2013. This article shares contemplative practices in business education and develops a body of knowledge and a skill-set to be used to educate graduate and undergraduate business students to become responsible decision makers. Contemplative practices lead students to know how to integrate their lives and actualize the ideals of business.

"An alternative paradigm for managing sustainability in the global supply chain" appears in Volume 3, Issue 4 (October-December) 2012 of International Journal of International Journal of Social Ecology and Sustainable Development. This paper is based on the author's five year field work (2006-2011) in China during which she interviewed thirty Chinese executives from twenty different foreign multinational enterprises. 

Kathleen Bishop, Adjunct Faculty at Broward College, will offer an "Artfulness and its Effect on Memory, Learning, and Creative Problem Solving" breakout session at the 24th Annual TASS Conference in Fort Lauderdale on March 17-20, 2013.

Aaron Godlaski, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at Centre College in Danville, KY, will be completing a qualitative evaluation of students enrolled in a winter intersession course entitled Zen and the Art of Going to College, developed and taught by Christian Haskett, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor of Religion). The course includes an in-depth analysis of Buddhism and contemporary applications of meditation, and asks students to engage in daily meditation and reflection. The study is designed to explore the phenomenological experience of learning contemplative practices, and to elucidate how students may integrate such practices beyond the context of a single course. This study is part of a new multidisciplinary initiative to incorporate contemplative studies in curricular and extra-curricular activities at Centre College.

Robin Greene extends an invitation to join the Third Annual Oaxaca Women's Writing, Meditation, and Yoga Retreat: Lifting Your Creative Voice (March 8-16, 2013). The retreat is based in the Zapotec weaving village of Teotitlan del Valle, amid the Bougainvillea blossoms, ripening pomegranates, and a backdrop of 9,000 foot mountain peaks. With Greene, Professor of Writing and English, as guide, you'll enjoy a supportive small-group atmosphere and be encouraged to find your own creative center. You'll have the opportunity to work with memoir, journaling, drama, poetry, and mixed-genre writing in an intimate workshop environment. Additionally, through daily meditation and yoga with certified instructor Beth Miller, you'll enjoy sessions tailored to each participant's physical level and needs. 

For information, contact greene.robin@gmail.com or visit:

http://oaxacaculture.com/2012/05/third-annual-oaxaca-womens-creative-writing-yoga-retreat-lifting-your-creative-voice/

Jason Laker has been selected as a 2013 Inaugural Visiting Scholar by the School and College Organization for Prevention Educator. In this capacity, he will be providing consultation to members and their institutions throughout the year, writing monthly newsletter columns, and speaking at their annual conference.

www.jasonlaker.com  or http://wearescope.org/resources/visiting-scholar/

Dr. Tyson Lewis, the director of the graduate program in Pedagogy and Philosophy at Montclair State University, is redesigning their EdD, expanding its focus to include community of inquiry, critical pedagogy, and contemplative pedagogy (P4C). Along with Maughn Gregory and David Keiser, he is conducting market research in order to gauge public interest in the new venture. 

All those interested are invited to complete the following survey, with appreciation from Tyson, Maughn and David.

https://surveys.montclair.edu/survey/entry.jsp?id=1351176699330

John Makransky will offer "Meditation, Interfaith Learning, and Social Service: Deep Learning Across Religious Boundaries" a day long retreat with teaching partner Paul Knitter from 9:30am - 5:00pm on Saturday February 09, 2013 at Boston College, Gasson Hall, Chestnut Hill.

The information is at this link:    

http://foundationforactivecompassion.org/schedule-of-events/details/54-john-makransky-meditation-interfaith-learning-a-social-service-comparative-theology-in-action

Donna Maurer (University of Maryland University College, distance educator in Sociology) has received a UMUC Faculty Research Grant Program Award to create a module on contemplative pedagogy for an Online Teaching and Learning Toolkit for instructors and students in the social sciences. 

She welcomes any suggestions/sharing of experiences regarding the use of contemplative practices to facilitate learning in online classrooms; contact Donna at dmaurer.editor@gmail.com.

Sabrina D. MisirHiralall, Montclair State University, and Shalom Gorewitz, Ramapo College, will be panelists in a Postcolonial Contemplative Philosophy of Education panel at The Middle Atlantic States Philosophy of Education Society (MASPES) 2013 Annual Meeting on Saturday, February 9th at New York University.

Title: Comparative Theology, a Postcolonial Hybrid of Religious Education

The presentation proposes comparative theology as an alternative way of doing religious education by which new forms of inclusivism and pluralism can be explicitly endorsed and disclosed. Presenter Jea Sophia Oh, Kean University, NJ focuses on analyzing the hybrid aspects of comparative theology as a constructive postcolonial theology. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall presents "The De-Orientalized Role of Kuchipudi Indian Classical Hindu Dance in Higher Education" exploring how Kuchipudi Indian classical Hindu dance serves as an educational tool in the West. Shalom Gorewitz presents "Meditation Across the Curriculum! A polemic." 

John Morrison started a blog, Contemplating Music, which may be of interest. He invites you to see how it strikes you... http://jhmedu.org/CM_blog

Sally K. Severino, MD delivered a lecture entitled "Intersubjectivity: Compassion/Violence - Origins and Corrections" in Capetown, South Africa on October 24, 2012.

The lecture focused on intersubjectivity as it relates to adorcism, a term coined by cultural anthropologists to refer to the type of spirit possession practiced in a culturally approved way in Africa. It represents the opposite of exorcism. Exorcism is an effort to drive out alien spirits that have taken possession of a person. Adorcism refers to an effort to invite into a person a spirit that can form a healing relationship with the person. Adorcism is a sort of benign mimetic identification. Implications for treating clients who suffer from wounds stemming from violence were addressed.

Getting Jobs

Tips of fingers meet my MacBook keyboard just as five students complete a political philosophy seminar, "Getting Jobs." Steve Jobs ditched his program at Reed College and hung around taking calligraphy courses. The Apple aesthetic was borne in those hours of leisure, and the gadgets he conceived reflect Jobs' encounter with the East: a trip to India as a young man and then his life-long meditation practice. Knowing the more sordid details of Jobs' life gives pause to whatever virtues we may attribute to his contemplative mind. Likewise, the clouds that he puts in place and myriad devices that enrapture us may seem more unsettling than contemplative.

Yet, this curious marriage of Western scientific rationalism, entrepreneurial spirit, and Eastern spaciousness is mirrored in our own contemplative practices and neurosciences of mindfulness. In the seminar we compared Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs to Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The six of us in "Getting Jobs" knew implicitly that any insight we might have about these unconventional paths would demand that we pause and practice the contemplative arts. So we did, throughout, by weekly visits to the Bodhi Path Buddhist Center.

Greeted by the generosity of Lama Tsony, former abbot of the Dhagpo Kundreul Ling Monastery in France and currently resident teacher at the Bodhi Path Buddhist Center in Natural Bridge, Virginia, we practiced how to be conversant (as we would wish all seminars to be). In the art of conversation, listening is essential, and this we did by the discipline of silence. The Heart Sutra and Guanaratana Bhante's Mindfulness in Plain English served as textual guides for our discernment; we had the Bodhi Path context and a meditation master to ease the way. By mutual consent, the principal writing assignment became a series of blog posts (two five-hundred word entries each week). Most students wrote well over 10,000 words: one has over forty single-spaces pages. Mimicking consciousness, the posts reveal student's self-conscious movements, appearing and disappearing, and the blog medium emulates Nietzsche's aphoristic writing and thinking.

I see quanta of creativity as a new form, an investigation about our own minds and thinking. While not a replacement of the mechanical research paper, so often seen as the only legitimate way to write in an academic setting, the medium allowed us to learn from our own personalities. On the art of story-telling, we reflected on Jonathan Gottshall's discussion of how neuroscience explains our propensity to metaphor and allegory in The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. Our writing confounded and conflated first and third person perspectives self-consciously; not pretending unadulterated objectivity or subjectivity.

For our inspiration, we took the work of neurophenomenologists who have been creators and defenders of contemplative space in higher education and proposed a new multi-perspectival rhetoric that we believe will become a staple in the academy. For now we baptize it contemplative political philosophy. Students deftly took the reins of this unwieldy chariot (as Plato's horseman in Phaedrus) and steered themselves to the edges of academic convention.

http://christophercalexander.wordpress.com/

http://rachelkalexander.wordpress.com/

http://adotium.com/

http://caminantesincamino24.wordpress.com/

The framework for our endeavors is available at: http://contemplativepoliticalphilosophy.com/

I promised to match student blog-writing myself and did so, keeping some posts aside for publication in other venues.

If curious, visit us at: http://acourseaboutnothing.com/

On the 45th anniversary of the day that I came gasping into this earthly existence I smiled out at my 34 new undergraduate students whom I was challenged to enlighten about professional practice. Although I had been teaching for many years, this was a new experience, a new part of my journey, and the butterflies threatened to take flight in my stomach. This was the first class in the University of Calgary's Bachelor of Education program, the first class which would soon evolve into secondary English teachers, my colleagues and fellow storytellers of the human tale. For years I had pondered what path I would take if such an opportunity arose. How would I guide the novice teachers through the complexities of teaching, specifically the complexities of teaching the human story and all its passion and power, the discipline we call English Language arts? I took a deep breath and smiled out at them, welcoming them to the tribe and with my eyes offering an invitation. This invitation was to join me on a journey, and then for them to carry forward on that journey with others. Slowly and mindfully, I asked them the question, How came you to be here, at this time and at this place? My goal was to set a tone of mindfulness to my teaching. "To bring mindfulness to the moment of teaching is to be able to respond to what is really going on, to life as it presents itself, with all its surprises from moment to moment." (Seidel, 2006, pg. 1907) A silence filled with contemplation fell over the room and I could see them really begin to think. This was not a theory or strategy that they could memorize to be added to the teacher toolkit but an authentic question about why they chose this path, this journey. An essential, authentic question which would be the holy grail of the explorations they were about to undertake. Hence began the exploration of our personal stories, our interconnected legends and the significance of these stories, in their various forms, to our greater learning community and the systems that we coexist within. This was an exploration that took me far beyond my expectations and inspired my heart and my academic mind to seek deeper into this process and its implications for teaching and learning in the Academy. "The inward path of the journey with inspiring landscapes and the outward path with political territories have both lead to a place where we imagine pedagogy again and again." (Meyer, 2003, pg. 21)

Our world is filled with stories and these stories are never truly finished. It is a spiral process that folds back onto itself, expressed and sometimes concealed, through the power of our language. Our stories are our journeys, our quests, and are a central aspect of our human experience. "The most basic purpose of going on a journey, then, is the very ordinary one of learning to be at home in a more creative way, in a good way, a healthy way, a way to be tuned to the deepest truth of things." (Smith, 1999 pg. 2)  It was then I realized that the reflection on the story of each member of our learning community was part of our journey and would guide and ground our studies. How came you to be here, at this time and this place and where are we going together now?

References:

Meyer, K. (2003) "(In) Different Spaces: Re-imagining Pedagogy in the Academy." In E. Hasebe-Ludt and W. Hurren (Eds.) Curriculum Intertext. New York, NY: Peter Lange Publishing

Seidel, J. (2006) "Some thoughts on teaching as a contemplative practice." In G. Natriello (Ed) Teachers' College Record. Columbia University: Teachers' College

Smith, D. (1999). Pedagon: interdisciplinary essays in the human sciences, pedagogy and culture. New York, NY: Peter Lange Publishing Inc.