Search results

In this chapter, we contribute to the conceptualization of self by engaging in a self-study of teacher education practices in which we distilled our perspectives on incorporating mindfulness in teacher education. Mindfulness is currently incorporated in teacher learning and education mostly toward stress-reduction and well-being, yet its ancestries stress its role as a path toward self-knowledge. Working in teacher education departments set in Israel, on the one hand, and Canada, on the other, we describe the place of the practice in our personal lives and articulate how we view its contribution to teacher education. Specifically, we focus on how “self” features in our endeavors, by examining “who it is” in the teacher that we seek to evoke/invoke by the application of mindfulness? We engaged in dialogue and reflective writing, in which each of us served as the other's critical friend in an attempt to clarify our different views. Oren emerges with a view of mindfulness as invoking “self as moment-to-moment experience” and the “teleological self,” both crucial for teachers. These senses of self mobilize us away from sociopolitical identities toward human-to-human relationships and reground teachers in the values they view as core to their call to teach. Conversely, Karen stresses the practice as a primer for situating the self in the sociopolitical. It enables deeper engagement in critical pedagogy, invoking teachers' “fluid self” situated in open-mindedness. Here mindfulness becomes a practice of social justice that allows us to acknowledge marginalized voices. Highlighting these different approaches, we contribute to the understanding of the role of mindfulness in teacher education. In particular, we extend the practice's main positioning within teacher well-being to its role within the discourse of teacher identity.

Business schools need to prepare students for effective, ethical decision-making. When faced with stressful life events that negatively affect wellbeing, making decisions can become more challenging. As future managers, students will need to learn how to make decisions when they are at the same time faced with stress and cognitive overload. In such situations, the brain looks for mental shortcuts in making choices to make things faster and easier, which leads to less optimal decision-making. Research shows that mindfulness meditation can effectively decrease stress and anxiety. Mindfulness meditation increases metacognition and, in the process, reduces the effects of biases, ethical blind spots, and psychological traps. Therefore, introducing students to these techniques has significant pedagogical potential for business education as students learn mindfulness meditation and show a need to include such practices in the curriculum. This chapter sheds light on two mindfulness technique cases with business school students in Lebanon and Switzerland. In these cases, the authors explore the impact of mindfulness practices on students by applying the emotional intelligence mood metre and mindfulness meditation. The authors also apply the ‘response time testing’ (RTT) methodology in the Swiss case to measure students’ attitudes. As a result, the authors provide simple confirmations from their classrooms that engaging in mindfulness activities and meditation is a simple and productive exercise that is essential for student wellbeing, learning, and decision-making. Therefore, the authors’ purpose is to encourage and give mindfulness practices a viable place in business education.

In the 1950s, Einstein predicted that if humankind is to survive, we will need a substantially new manner of thinking. He believed that our task in life must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its infinite beauty. The combined disciplines of mindfulness, ecopsychology, and sustainability education offer humanity a chance to develop this new way of thinking and being in the world. In this chapter, I describe my experience of teaching and designing curriculum that integrates contemplative practices with sustainability education in the space of higher education. The course I will be discussing, where nature-based mindfulness activities are offered, is called “MindBody Wellness.” As a part of the course, it is hoped that students will cultivate an expanded vision of the self—one known as the “ecological self”—a term coined in the 1980s. The ecological self is perceived to be a wide, expansive, or field-like sense of self, which ultimately includes all life forms, ecosystems, and the Earth. Preliminary research in the field indicates that cultivating loving-kindness and practicing mindfulness leads to a greater level of nature connectedness and need to care for and protect the natural world. However, my colleagues and I did not find this to be the case and needed to explicitly give students instructions to care for the environment.

We explored the potential of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education as a tool for enhancing mindfulness, body awareness, and perceptions of transformational leadership capacities among college students. The intervention consisted of thirty-two, 1.25-hour long group sessions taught by a certified Feldenkrais instructor twice weekly to 21 undergraduates in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre of a southwestern state university. Students also were required to keep a journal in which they reflected on how they felt prior to and after each class, and then recorded three additional entries during the week with observations about their experiences with thinking, sensing, feeling, and moving. Repeated measures analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was conducted to assess changes in levels of mindfulness, body awareness, and perceived leadership capacities using standardized scales administered at study baseline, midterm, and end of term. Over the semester, students evidenced significantly greater mindfulness, body awareness, and a domain of transformational leadership measuring empathy, controlling for their level of stress at the time of final exams. To meet the needs of today’s college students, our results suggest that the Feldenkrais Method shows promise as an intervention to promote mindfulness, body awareness, and empathic leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of mindfulness practice on health behaviors and quality of life (QOL) among hypertensive patients.

A quasi-experimental research was designed by before, after and a follow-up phase (i.e. on the 0th, 6th and 12th weeks). Two primary health care units (PCU) were selected as control and experiment groups. Samples included patients 35–59 years old who had been diagnosed with stage I hypertension. Both groups received treatment according to standard hypertension guidelines. The experimental group was added as a drill for the purpose of a mindfulness-based health education (MBHE) practice that would emphasize behavior skills (in diet, exercise and mental function) and instill a feeling of adaptation to everyday life.

The total mean score of the prevention and promotional hypertension behaviors (PPHB), QOL, perceived in mindfulness (MF) and self-efficacy (SE) in the experiment group showed a significant statistical difference when compared to the control group in the 6th week in PPHB and SE (p<0.001), QOL and MF (p=0.001). Similar results were found in the 12th week in PPHB, QOL, SE (p<0.001) and MF (p=0.023), respectively.

However, finished implementation in experiment group, during the follow-up phase on the 12th week, ten participants in the control group were excluded (Figure 1). It may be no active intervention or as usual in the control group. Thus, the authors controlled missing data using intention-to-treat analysis comparison and the data distribution was successfully tested by a normality plot before the use of statistical data. Based on the results of this study, the following recommendations can be made: patients should practice in mindfulness in lifestyle modification continued for intensive skill practice over the long term in order to promote sustainability in behavior and in QOL.

Mindfulness trainer should drill and faith in the value of mindfulness corporation owner with patients learning all of the times; and for health practitioner, it should add MBHE for patients.

Education institution should add mindfulness in educational programs all of graduates.

The mindfulness practice-based health education training should be in counterpart with modern medicine in order to promote sound health behaviors and an improved QOL for stage I hypertensive patients and to forestall cardiovascular and blood-pressure diseases.

For the interested teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher seeking an entry point into how mindfulness relates to teachers’ work, the burgeoning and divergent appeals for the relevance of mindfulness to teachers can be bewildering. The purpose of this paper is to offer teachers, teacher educators and educational researchers a conceptual framework for understanding the different orientations and sources of mindfulness as it has been recommended to teachers.

Using Foucault’s (1972) concept of “discursive formations” as a heuristic device, this paper argues that mindfulness as pitched to teachers can be helpfully understood as arising from three distinct orientations.

Statements about mindfulness and its relevance to teachers emerge from three distinct discursive formations – traditional, psychological and engaged – that each constitute the “problem” faced by teachers respectively as suffering, stress or alienation. Specific conceptions of mindfulness are then advanced as a solution to these problems by certain authoritative subjects and institutions in ways that are taken as legitimate within each discursive formation.

Apart from offering a historical and discursive mapping of the different discursive formations from which mindfulness is pitched to teachers, this paper also highlights how each of these orientations impies a normative view of what a teacher should be. Suggestions for further historical research are also offered along the lines of genealogy, epistemology and ontology.

This article considers the integration of aspects of mindfulness, social and emotional learning (SEL) and leadership wellness practice as a structure for a pedagogy of wellness in rural schools. Research has demonstrated positive outcomes for K–12 students and teachers as a result of training in practices such as mindfulness and SEL, but there has been less attention toward wellness practices incorporated by educational leaders in their own work. Support of professional and community learning for mindfulness may begin with district and school-based leaders in many communities, who facilitate programs in their schools.

This article explores an emergent pedagogy of wellness, which was developed in a small rural district that applied wellness programming, including mindfulness, with parallel learning experiences for leaders, staff members, students and families.

Through engagement with multiple local stakeholder groups in integrating themes of SEL, mindfulness and leadership wellness, the pedagogy of wellness emerged as a potential framework for improved organizational health, new conceptualizations of students’ success and opportunities for engagement of families in systemic organization of practices of care.

Consideration of the preparation of leadership in wellness practices such as mindfulness is discussed, in light of the necessity to address the care and wellness needs of rural communities, toward the sustainability of the pedagogy of wellness.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a study conducted for the purpose of learning more about the mindfulness experiences of college students and their teachers. To assist in developing a more inclusive approach to the teaching of mindfulness tailored to the individual needs of more vulnerable students and to inform teacher training and curriculum development.

This three-phase phenomenological study involved face-to-face and online contact with community college students and teachers involved in courses that incorporated mindfulness meditation. The findings from interviews with students in phase 1 were shared with teachers in phase 2 along with suggestions for safeguarding in phase 3 but initial results are promising as a number of safeguards have already been put into place.

This study found that mindfulness meditation is not necessarily a positive experience for vulnerable college students and their teachers and that there was a need for more teacher training, knowledge and ongoing support about the effects of some mindfulness meditations on some vulnerable students and how to adjust their intensity.

While this is a small qualitative study, the majority of students interviewed reported unusual experiences. This this is not well known in the literature on mindfulness in higher education, and a search of the clinical literature supports the findings that significant safeguards and adjustments are needed for mindfulness meditation for vulnerable students in educational, non-clinical settings. Further research is needed.

An implication of this study is that mindfulness meditation in its current form is likely to be unsuitable for vulnerable students. Practical recommendations for safeguarding mindfulness in higher education are already being trialed, as mentioned in this paper and will be the subject of more extensive exploration in another paper.

There are significant implications in these findings that the potential harmful effects of mindfulness may be overlooked and may be more commonly experienced than is currently realized especially for individuals with a history of trauma, with addictions, mental health difficulties or self-harm.

An innovation in this study is its methodology which drew out students’ and teachers’ own experience of mindfulness meditation in their own words when most mindfulness studies are quantitative and tend to focus on outcomes before understanding. In addition, the findings were presented directly to teachers making it possible to see how little they knew about their students’ experiences. This created an opening and a willingness to adopt safeguarding recommendations.

In this chapter, I will draw upon East-Asian wisdom traditions, quantum, transpersonal, and integral theory to posit consciousness as fundamental. In doing so, the relationship between Self and reality will be articulated as nondual. I will argue that knowledge about the nature of Self is both an educational entitlement and learning process. Such understanding is generally thwarted by the impact of scientific materialism and behaviorism on educational orthodoxy, which instead promulgate a separate sense of self with destructive individual and collective consequences. Moving from philosophical theorization to application to teacher education, I will argue that a massive program of deconditioning and unlearning is necessary within education and show how a module I teach, “Responding Mindfully to Challenging Behavior,” attempts to do some of this work via a focus on “discipline.” The focus of the module invites us to question the nature of Self when difficulties arise. As explored, this is often a conditioned self with automatic reactions that can shift toward a “witnessing consciousness” when experiential learning and contemplative practices are integrated with theories of human flourishing.