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This project provides for creation of a course that looks at Vipassana meditation from three broad perspectives: experiential, psychological/scientific, and philosophical. Students learn to meditate and compare that experience with other contemplative exercises. They bring that experience to bear on questions about research on well-being and on perennial philosophical questions about the nature of the self.

Mystical texts and the visual arts have contributed immeasurably to shaping individual and collective conceptions of the spiritual in modern and postmodern culture. By integrating rigorous textual analysis with direct experiential practices, we will bring a multifaceted approach to bear on the relationship between aesthetic, intellectual and mystical creativity—that is, between the often conflicting domains of spiritual experience, intellectual analysis, and beauty—in order to gain insight into the ways in which these distinctive yet overlapping modalities of knowledge have integrally shaped developments in high culture, sacred practice and visual representation. Drawing on the combined methodological perspectives of Art History and Religious Studies, we will examine the ways in which the contemplative and experiential practices of museum viewing, ritual performances, trans-cultural encounter and focused reading and writing activities can all serve as powerful acts of human self-creation.

This class will explores various forms of physically-based contemplative practices. We will progress from individual practices to partnering practices, to exploring the possibility of creating a group practice, and the creation of a public contemplative space.

Reading and Writing Women’s Lives’ is a course designed to introduce you to genres of writing that involve personal and lived experience about and by women: personal essay, biography, autobiography, and autoethnography. Not only will we be reading these forms as well as theories about writing and women’s experience, but we will also try our hand at producing them ourselves. The guiding method of this course is collaborative learning: between teacher and students, between me and each of you, between each of you and your own small group or the class in general. The course emphasizes dialogue and process–experiential learning at its heart, since the very topic of the course necessitates that we confront our understanding of experience itself, and confront the ways our understanding of our selves depends on it. Together we will learn to recognize and examine various scripts for being and knowing, in order to seize the one(s) we find most meaningful.

Spirituality is becoming an increasingly significant aspect of contemporary art education theory. The manner in which one conceives of holistic art education curricula is partially shaped by one's understanding of a more spiritual approach to reflective thinking and practice in teacher education. Definitions of reflective practice and spirituality, as they are interwoven in art, are provided. Focally, the results of research on artist/teachers and the manifestation of spiritual reflective practice are presented in conjunction with the implications of those research results for preservice art education.

This project explores the integration of Zen Buddhist contemplative practices with practices entailed in academic, especially literary, reading. The mindfulness cultivated through Zen practices, and the ethical awareness that can spring from that mindfulness can inspire an academic reading practice that is both faithful to the particulars of a text’s form and sensitive to its ethical and political implications.

The specific aim of this course is development of a university dance curriculum that will link post-modern dance with Tai Chi as it is understood and practiced by the masters of the discipline in China – both as a practice (i.e., as a set of physical movements known as “Tai Chi Chuan”) and as a spiritual discipline (i.e., “Tai Chi”) worthy of scholarly study. A central hypothesis of this course is that the teaching of Tai Chi Chuan in this country – both in academic and experiential contexts – has generally missed the essence of the actual Chinese discipline by concentrating more on the specific physical steps than on the deeper mental and spiritual principles from which it derives. A major goal of the course is to restore to the curriculum those important principles of employing certain meditation techniques that have not been taught here. The course will apply two central principles of Tai Chi in the context of dance: first, the goal of awareness, or softness, which is simply movement based on stillness; and second, the goal of relational physics, or the intention and orientation of the individual to the whole.

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