<p>The study reported here is seeking to gain enhanced understandings of the acquisition and development of core and generic skills in higher education and employment against a backcloth of continued pressure for their effective delivery from employers, government departments, and those responsible for the management and funding of higher education. This pressure appears to have had little impact so far, in part because of tutors' scepticism of the message, the messenger and its vocabulary, and in part because the skills demanded lack clarity, consistency and a recognisable theoretical base. Any empirical attempt to acquire enhanced understandings of practice thus requires the conceptualisation and development of models of generic skills and of course provision. These models are presented together with evidence of their validity, including exemplars of the patterns of course provision identified.</p>
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Sometimes life seems like it's all about hurrying--so many places to go! And sometimes it's hard when things don't go your way--it can make a piggy angry and sad. So how do young piggies find a peaceful place in a frustrating world? They meditate!
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<p>The premise of this dissertation is that Buddhism must inculturate to meet the context of contemporary North America. Given the widespread interest in the application of Buddhist-derived ideas and practices in a host of secular settings, the capacity for teachers to engage with new ideas and disciplines will be crucial to the tradition's continued relevance. Because there is a high demand for and interest in Buddhist-derived programming in secular spaces, the number of individuals and organizations striving to meet this demand is mushrooming. This trend, coupled with a dearth of professional training programs and accreditation processes means that not only are there an eclectic array of approaches being used to teach meditation, but there is also minimal discourse engaging the crucial question of what constitutes effective pedagogy or adequate training processes for teachers. Chapter 1 establishes the need for the inculturation of Buddhism. This imperative for adaptation raises fundamental questions regarding how to best evaluate the authenticity of changes to traditional teaching methods. In Chapters 2 and 3, the Buddhist doctrine of skillful means is explored with an eye toward distilling guiding principles for analyzing this process of adaptation of teachings to meet a variety of cultural and personal perspectives. Drawing from Mahayana and pre-Mahayana sutras, traditions of commentary, and contemporary hermeneutics, a set of priorities based on the perspective of the Buddhist tradition is proposed. In Chapter 4, it is established that finding points of relevance to particular cultural concerns such as physical and mental health issues has been a vital component of existing efforts toward secularized meditation programs to date. This chapter concludes by drawing out of such present practices additional guiding principles to advance the process of pedagogical inculturation. Despite the widespread interest in applying meditation to a variety of settings, the pedagogy and philosophy of education behind the various approaches remains largely under-theorized. To fill this need, Chapter 5 establishes a set of guiding principles for pedagogical adaptation, drawing from the tradition's own self-understanding as well as from the insights of Western education as discussed in the prior 4 chapters. Finally, Chapter 6 offers an example of inculturated pedagogy at work.</p>
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<p>Literature is reviewed suggesting that a child's personality determines to a large extent his or her reaction to specific methods of teaching, and even to the whole ethos and atmosphere of the teaching situation. Thus, extraverted children benefit from being taught along the lines of discovery learning, while introverted children benefit from being taught along the lines of reception learning. The apparent lack of difference in achievement in groups taught by these methods hides the large individual differences factor that appears in the interaction term. It is suggested that facts of this kind should be of considerable concern to those who design our courses for future teachers, and for teachers generally. We owe our children care in the design of methods for teaching, and personality differences play an important part in such design.</p>
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A cardinal dimension of adult development and the learning most uniquely adult pertains to becoming aware that one is caught in one's own history and is reliving it. This leads to a process of perspective transforma tion involving a structural change in the way we see ourselves and our rela tionships. If the culture permits, we move toward perspectives which are more inclusive, discriminating and integrative of experience. We move away from uncritical, organic relationships toward contractual relation ships with others, institutions and society. Perspective transformation refor mulates the criteria for valuing and for taking action. Behavior change is often a function of such transformation. In this emerging transformation theory, adult education finds its own inherent goals and functions.
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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.
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The aim of this article is to investigate how a contemplative orientation to teaching may facilitate wholeness for teachers and students through a portrait of Diana, a kindergarten teacher working in a contemplative elementary school. The portrait, one of three portraits from a larger study, illustrates three central features of contemplative teaching: compassion, integrity, and mindful awareness. These three central features develop internally within individual teachers and are animated and influenced externally through their role as teachers. The context of their teaching, relationships with students, parents, and colleagues, and pedagogical choices, in turn influence the three central features. The emphasis on wholeness, unity, and integration of a contemplative orientation to teaching moves us toward a view of teachers and students as beings with not only minds and heads but also hearts and bodies. Contemplative teaching offers educational communities a path toward transformational, holistic, and integrative learning and teaching.
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<p>The current study evaluated psychosocial variables that may contribute to the experience of headache in college adults. One hundred ninety-nine participants, 103 women and 96 men, completed head pain logs for 4 weeks after completing measures assessing psychosocial variables. Multiple regression analyses indicated that level of emotional functioning, perception of stress, and gender were predictive of future headache frequency, intensity, and duration. Family history and health habits did not predict headache activity. These findings are consistent with research investigating psychosocial variables and headache activity.</p>
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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.
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This highly interdisciplinary program combines a solid grounding in jazz and improvised music study with courses which involve meditative practices and other areas related to creative development.
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<p>Recent literature has described how the capacity for concurrent self-assessment—ongoing moment-to-moment self-monitoring—is an important component of the professional competence of physicians. Self-monitoring refers to the ability to notice our own actions, curiosity to examine the effects of those actions, and willingness to use those observations to improve behavior and thinking in the future. Self-monitoring allows for the early recognition of cognitive biases, technical errors, and emotional reactions and may facilitate self-correction and development of therapeutic relationships. Cognitive neuroscience has begun to explore the brain functions associated with self-monitoring, and the structural and functional changes that occur during mental training to improve attentiveness, curiosity, and presence. This training involves cultivating habits of mind such as experiencing information as novel, thinking of “facts” as conditional, seeing situations from multiple perspectives, suspending categorization and judgment, and engaging in self-questioning. The resulting awareness is referred to as mindfulness and the associated moment-to-moment self-monitoring as mindful practice—in contrast to being on “automatic pilot” or “mindless” in one's behavior. This article is a preliminary exploration into the intersection of educational assessment, cognitive neuroscience, and mindful practice, with the hope of promoting ways of improving clinicians' capacity to self-monitor during clinical practice, and, by extension, improve the quality of care that they deliver.</p>
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Social class is shaped by an individual's material resources as well as perceptions of rank vis-à-vis others in society, and in this article, we examine how class influences behavior. Diminished resources and lower rank create contexts that constrain social outcomes for lower-class individuals and enhance contextualist tendencies--that is, a focus on external, uncontrollable social forces and other individuals who influence one's life outcomes. In contrast, abundant resources and elevated rank create contexts that enhance the personal freedoms of upper-class individuals and give rise to solipsistic social cognitive tendencies--that is, an individualistic focus on one's own internal states, goals, motivations, and emotions. Guided by this framework, we detail 9 hypotheses and relevant empirical evidence concerning how class-based contextualist and solipsistic tendencies shape the self, perceptions of the social environment, and relationships to other individuals. Novel predictions and implications for research in other socio-political contexts are considered.
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<p>In this article I attempt, through stories and reflections, to give voice to some contemporary experiences, including fears and difficulties, of being a teacher in the early 21st century. I explore the idea that contemplative practices might open paths for negotiating and rediscovering depth, grace, and courage in our work as teachers, in a time when such ways of living are not broadly or politically encouraged. This article thus focuses on ways in which contemplative practices become pedagogical, holding us in the present, in close proximity to the lives of the children we teach, to the places we actually live, and to the current conditions of the world both near and far--these practices, as opposed to distracting and distancing curricula and practices that seem to exist in no place or time, separate from the world, without relations, and with lofty and ungrounded goals located in the future, such as "preparing children to compete in the global economy." I reflect about ways that the practice of contemplative teaching turns our work into a form of love, memory, and intimacy, reminding us of our deep life relations through time and place, and possibly having incalculable implications for our curriculum interpretation and classroom practices.</p>
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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.
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This paper argues the case for meditation with children. It seeks to define what meditation is, why it is important and how it can be practised with children. Meditation provides a good starting point for learning and creativity. It builds upon a long tradition of meditative practice in religious and humanistic settings and research gives evidence of its practical benefits. We need to help children find natural ways for body and mind to combat the pressures of modern living and to find better ways to help focus their minds on matters of importance. There are strong pedagogical reasons for including meditation as part of the daily experience of pupils of all ages and abilities. Meditation is a proven means for stilling the mind, encouraging mindfulness, and providing optimum conditions for generative thinking and reflection. This paper aims to encourage more experimentation and research into meditative practice with children.
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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.
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<p>Studied the different effects of yoga and psychomotor activity on a coding task, with 34 children referred to a learning center as Ss. They received a baseline period, a control period involving a fine motor task, an experimental treatment, another control period, a treatment reversal, and a control period. The results indicate that order of treatment had no effect on the results. Furthermore, coding scores in the 2nd half of the experiment were higher than those in the 1st half. There was no difference in the effect on performance of yoga and gross motor activities. Irrespective of which treatment was given, scores after treatment were significantly higher than those during the control periods. There are implications for physical education programming in elementary schools.</p>
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This webpage of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society provides several sample syllabi which integrate contemplation into academic courses on a variety of subjects.
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Purpose: To systematically review articles reporting on depression, anxiety, and burnout among U.S. and Canadian medical students.
Method: Medline and PubMed were searched to identify peer-reviewed English-language studies published between January 1980 and May 2005 reporting on depression, anxiety, and burnout among U.S. and Canadian medical students. Searches used combinations of the Medical Subject Heading terms medical student and depression, depressive disorder major, depressive disorder, professional burnout, mental health, depersonalization, distress, anxiety, or emotional exhaustion. Reference lists of retrieved articles were inspected to identify relevant additional articles. Demographic information, instruments used, prevalence data on student distress, and statistically significant associations were abstracted.
Results: The search identified 40 articles on medical student psychological distress (i.e., depression, anxiety, burnout, and related mental health problems) that met the authors' criteria. No studies of burnout among medical students were identified. The studies suggest a high prevalence of depression and anxiety among medical students, with levels of overall psychological distress consistently higher than in the general population and age-matched peers by the later years of training. Overall, the studies suggest psychological distress may be higher among female students. Limited data were available regarding the causes of student distress and its impact on academic performance, dropout rates, and professional development.
Conclusions: Medical school is a time of significant psychological distress for physicians-in-training. Currently available information is insufficient to draw firm conclusions on the causes and consequences of student distress. Large, prospective, multicenter studies are needed to identify personal and training-related features that influence depression, anxiety, and burnout among students and explore relationships between distress and competency.
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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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