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As contemplative pedagogy on higher education campuses grows, so does interest in supporting additional faculty in using contemplative practices. At our small, liberal arts teachinguniversity in the southeast USA, our faculty contemplative learning circle has steadily widened and worked to integrate mindfulness and other practices into our campus activities.
We became interested in how contemplative practices are already happening in our classrooms without being named as such, and if finding out about them might elucidate opportunities to support faculty in deepening and expanding current efforts. This paper presents
the findings from an interview study with 35 faculty members not formally participating in
faculty activities involving contemplative pedagogy. Faculty spontaneously mentioned some
activities that may be considered contemplative in their descriptions of effective teaching
strategies, such as class discussions, experiential activities, and journaling. Among a provided list of contemplative activities, the most frequently used were discussions/debates,
journaling/reflective writing, and beholding, though the ways in which faculty implemented
the activities varied. Faculty offered many examples of activities that could be considered
contemplative or introspective, and the ways they used the activities differed by discipline.
When asked directly, 18 participants reported that they used contemplative practices or
pedagogy in some way, nine reported that they were uncertain about the definition and/
or whether they used them, and eight responded that they do not use them. Many faculty
members also indicated interest in learning more about how to incorporate contemplative
practices in teaching, suggesting an opportunity for enhanced faculty development efforts.
Self-reflective writing is one method of inquiring into one's inner experience of learning. But what aspects of self are honors students invited to reflect on when they are asked to write informally in their notebooks on what they've just heard or read? Are they asked to explore their "thoughts" and "feelings"? "Feelings": are they asked to pay attention to and describe physical sensation as well as emotional responses to whatever text is under consideration? Are physical sensations--quickening of breath, sinking feeling in the chest, tightening of the throat--even relevant to critical imaginative thinking? Psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators familiar with the benefits of contemplative practices say that physical sensation is as worthy of investigation as thought, and they suggest that various kinds of contemplative practices, including self-reflective writing, repeating short phrases, concentration on the breath, guided visualizations, deep listening, adapted for the classroom, can help students improve their ability to direct and sustain their attention on an object of inquiry, learn to recognize and live with ambiguity and uncertainty, and develop resilience that is useful to learning (Hart; Palmer & Zajonc; Simmer-Brown & Grace). Richard Chess' experience of integrating contemplative practices into his The Holocaust and the Arts course has convinced him of the value of such practices for these reasons as well as for the purpose of deepening a sense of community among the students. Further, when these practices are clearly linked to the course "content," they increase the likelihood of students engaging deeply with demanding, difficult (emotionally, intellectually, even spiritually) material. Herein he describes a variety of contemplative exercises he used in teaching The Holocaust and the Arts. The intent of the exercises is to encourage students to observe their own experiences and possibly gain insights into themselves as well as into the experiences of others, including the experiences of Holocaust victims/survivors