More Praise for Contemplative Practices in Higher Education

“This book is a hugely inspiring and practical resource for educators, giving them a whole other dimension of experience from which to bring to life the beauty of their subject and engage their students in discovering that beauty for themselves. Contemplative practices, integrated into the curriculum of higher education in the ways the authors describe and advocate so skillfully and compellingly, have the capacity to transform our relationship to learning itself, in all its mystery, intimacy, difficulty, and wonder.”—Jon Kabat Zinn, author, Full Catastrophe Living and Mindfulness for Beginners

“Contemplative Practices in Higher Education is truly a breakthrough book, showing how profound attentiveness, intellectual rigor, and self-knowledge can be seamlessly woven together. It offers us a transformed view of a student, a teacher, the academy, and the world.”—Sharon Salzberg, author, Lovingkindness and Real Happiness

“Visionary, yet immensely practical and thorough! Can enhance the skill, understanding, and well-being of students and provide the missing half of education.”—Jack Kornfield, author, A Path with Heart

“At long last we have a comprehensive overview of the burgeoning field of Contemplative Pedagogy written by two of its leaders and pioneers. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the theory and practice of Contemplative Education.”—Harold D. Roth, professor of religious studies and founder and director, Brown University Contemplative Studies Initiative

“Barbezat and Bush set forth a blueprint for a quiet revolution in education—placing student experience at the center of our learning objectives, supporting students in reconnecting with themselves while enabling them to feel their connections with an ever more diverse world. As our problems grow in complexity, the urgent need for such a revolution becomes clear. These pages hold the most practical approach yet for a way forward: transforming what happens in our classrooms, and actually changing the world—one student at a time.”—Rhonda Magee, professor of law and codirector, Center for Teaching Excellence, University of San Francisco

“This book tells the wonderful and creative way of expanding and increasing the possibilities of higher education through contemplative practices. The authors clearly reveal and express the important and meaningful ties between teaching and learning and the power of contemplative practices, better connecting education to life. The best educators often seek ways to expand and broaden their reach and knowledge—this book will help them achieve that goal.”—Bradford C. Grant, director, School of Architecture and Design, and associate dean, College of Engineering, Architecture, and Computer Sciences, Howard University

“A great guide to developing contemplative courses. ‘Poetry and Meditation,’ the experimental course I taught in Spring 2000 at West Point as a Contemplative Practices Fellow, changed much of what I thought I knew about teaching and learning, and by doing that, changed my life.”—Marilyn Nelson, chancellor, Academy of American Poets

“The work represented in this book has been influential and inspirational in opening the doors to a new dimension of learning. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality has brought these contemplative practices—text study, reflection and yoga—into courses in a leading rabbinical school in New York, and thus magnified the impact of its program of spiritual formation of future rabbis and cantors enormously, as well as bringing faculty members together in generative cross-departmental study.”—Rabbi Rachel Cowan, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

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Foreword

Parker J. Palmer

When I think about the reforms needed if higher education is to serve our students and our world faithfully and well, I think there should be a litmus test for every project that claims to strengthen the mission of our colleges and universities. Does this proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that supports the inseparable causes of truth, love, and justice? If the answer is no, we should take a pass and redouble our efforts to find a proposal that does.

Of course, many college graduates go on to do socially constructive, occasionally noble, and sometimes heroic things with their lives. But when I look at the malfeasance of well-educated leaders in business and finance, in health care and education, in politics and religion, I see too many people whose expert knowledge—and the power that comes with it—has not been joined to a professional ethic, a sense of communal responsibility, or even simple compassion.

The reasons for this are many and complex. But one culprit is easily named: the objectivist model of knowing, teaching, and learning that has dominated, and deformed, higher education. Objectivism begins as an epistemology rooted in a false conception of science that insists on a wall of separation between the knower and the known. This, in turn, leads to a pedagogy that keeps students at arm's length from the subjects they learn about. And that, in turn, creates an ethical gap between the educated person and a world that is inevitably impacted by his or her actions, a failure to embrace the fact that one is a moral actor with communal responsibilities. When this trickle-down effect is at its worst, it contributes to the process by which “scholars, artists, lawyers, theologians and aristocrats” end up not just doing wrong but actively collaborating in evil.

These chilling words from Konnilyn G. Feig (1979) are never far from my mind:

We have identified certain “civilizing” aspects of the modern world—music, art, a sense of family, love, appreciation of beauty, intellect, education … [But] after Auschwitz we must realize that being a killer, a family man, and a lover of Beethoven are not contradictions. The killers did not belong to a gutter society of misfits, nor could they be dismissed as just a collection of rabble. They were scholars, artists, lawyers, theologians and aristocrats. (p. 57)

This book is important because it offers a powerful corrective to the chain of philosophical errors that has loosed too many amoral and even immoral educated people on the world. That corrective involves “contemplative practice,” a phrase some faculty may find odd or even off-putting in the context of academic culture. Contemplation may sound like something that belongs in the mystical world of religion and spirituality, not in the empirical, rational world of the academy.

But as Daniel Barbezat and Mirabai Bush explain with care—and with the credibility that comes from years of scholarly research and classroom application—the contemplative practices described in this book will deepen, not damage, academic culture. The pedagogical elements found here help students focus more intently on subjects ranging from physics to literature, connect as whole persons with what they are learning, and feel more keenly their responsibilities as educated persons in the larger ecology of human and nonhuman life. These are outcomes that all good teachers strive for and that this book can help teachers in every field achieve.

The contemporary movement to bring contemplative practice back to higher education is now some twenty-five years old. I say “bring contemplative practice back” because contemplation is nothing new in the academy. It was once part and parcel of the intellectual life, a legacy of the monastic schools of the early Middle Ages that are among the ancestors of modern higher education.

At the heart of contemplation is the same quality that is at the heart of all great scholarship: profound attentiveness to the phenomena that one is trying to understand. This is the kind of attentiveness practiced, for example, by Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. As Sue V. Rosser (1992) has said, McClintock, who studied maize en route to her breakthrough discoveries related to genetic transposition, “gained valuable knowledge by empathizing with her corn plants, submerging herself in their world and dissolving the boundary between object and observer” (p. 46). Rosser might as well have said that McClintock was a contemplative scientist par excellence, which is exactly what she was.

The philosophers of ancient Greece are also among higher education's ancestry, not least Socrates with his famous dictum, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Here, too, is a lost element of higher education's legacy that can be recovered through contemplative practice, and recover it we must: people who choose to live an unexamined life almost inevitably live in ways that do damage to themselves and to others.

In the Socratic formulation, the focus of contemplation is not McClintock's maize or another subject of study. It is the self of the scholar or the student, the inner dynamics of those who teach and learn—and then, for better or worse, deploy their knowledge as power in the world. Students whose minds and hearts have been formed by contemplation of self as well as world are much more likely to become the kinds of ethical actors we need at a time when basic human values—values the academy arose, in part, to protect—are so widely threatened.

If you are a long-time advocate of contemplative practice in higher education, you will soon find that this is a breakthrough book in the field. If you are an academic who wonders if “contemplation” and “higher education” belong in the same sentence, you may find that this is a breakthrough book for you professionally.

Wherever you find yourself along that continuum, please read on. This is a book that can help thoughtful teachers transform their pedagogies and the lives of their students in ways that will contribute to the transformation of the academy and the making of a better world.

Parker J. Palmer, founder and senior partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal, is a well-known writer, speaker, and activist. He has published nine books, including the best-selling Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, A Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, along with ten honorary doctorates, two Distinguished Achievement Awards from the National Educational Press Association, and an Award of Excellence from the Associated Church Press. In 2010, Palmer was given the William Rainey Harper Award, whose previous recipients include Margaret Mead, Elie Wiesel, and Paolo Freire. In 2011, he was named an Utne Reader Visionary, one of “25 people who are changing your world.”

Preface

Contemplative practices, a vital part of all major religious and spiritual traditions, have long had a place in intellectual inquiry. The predecessors of our colleges and universities in the West, of course, were established as alternatives to monastic schools, where contemplative practices had been central to learning. But even within these new institutions, committed to the pursuit of rational knowledge and later to the scientific method, educators have long been exploring the use of contemplative practices in learning. As we apply these practices to higher education, clearly we must keep them separate from ideology or creed; the invitation must be to explore students' own beliefs and views so that the first-person, critical inquiry becomes an investigation rather than an imposition of particular views. This book is about contemporary contemplative contributions to modern pedagogy.

Contemplative Practice and the Academy

Our own journey began in 1995 when a group of leaders in philanthropy, education, health care, and psychology came together to discuss how contemplative practices, which were being used successfully in health and healing programs, could have a beneficial impact on higher education. We formed the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society with coauthor Mirabai Bush as director and, following board chair Charlie Halpern's leadership, decided to offer fellowships for contemplative curriculum development. These fellowships would seek to restore and renew the critical contribution that contemplative practices can make to the life of teaching, learning, and scholarship. At the heart of the program was the belief that bringing contemplative practice into the academy would have pedagogical and intellectual benefits and that contemplative awareness can help to create a more just, compassionate, and reflective society.

Contemplative practices were found only on the fringe of the educational world at that time, but a fellowship program was a conventional way to introduce new ideas, and, to our amazement, the American Council of Learned Societies agreed to administer them. The fellows would receive grants, develop courses that integrated contemplative practices into the curriculum, teach the courses, and write reports about their experience. When we thought about who might apply, we realized that none of us knew even one academic who would want to do this, but we put the announcement out into the world through the Chronicle of Higher Education and waited. An astonishing 125 scholars submitted rigorous proposals for innovative courses, from the disciplines of English, philosophy, psychology, architecture, American studies, and law. In 1997, we awarded 16 fellowships. And every year from then until 2009, we received at least 100 applications and awarded at least 10 more fellowships. There are now 152 fellows in more than one hundred colleges and universities.

After a few years, we recognized that we needed a full program, which would include serving those we could not fund through fellowships. Arthur Zajonc, the first academic director, posed this central question: “The university is well-practiced at educating the mind for critical reasoning, critical writing and critical speaking as well as for scientific and quantitative analysis. But is this sufficient? In a world beset with conflicts, internal as well as external, isn't it of equal if not greater importance to balance the sharpening of our intellects with the systematic cultivation of our hearts?”

The program developed this vision for the future:

1. A national community of scholars interested in contemplative practice will exist in diverse fields, linked to and supportive of each other.

2. Contemplative practice will be familiar and acceptable on campuses as a lifestyle and recognized and valued as a way of learning and teaching.

3. A growing body of scholarship will be developed on contemplative practice as a pedagogy and on the history of contemplative practice.

4. A space for silence and contemplative practice will exist on many campuses.

We offered an annual week-long summer session on curriculum development at Smith College and then an annual conference at Amherst College at which professors could present their work to colleagues in this growing field. We formed a membership organization, the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

The question of contemplative epistemology is only beginning to be explored (most significantly by Arthur Zajonc, who has called it the “epistemology of love”), but we do know that the contemplative approach is one of inquiry into the nature of things, a scientific suspension of disbelief (and belief) in an attempt to “know” reality through direct observation by being fully present in the moment. Chogyam Trungpa, founder of the first US contemplative center for higher education, Naropa University, said contemplative wisdom is “immediate and nonconceptual insight which provides the basic inspiration for intellectual study.” Having seen clearly one's own mind, one has a natural desire to see how others experience reality.

This book is the next ripple outward in providing support for the introduction of contemplative practices into teaching, learning, and research. We have written a brief account of the historical, intellectual, and spiritual/religious context of contemplative practice and pedagogy and provided examples not to imitate but to be inspired by. To do this, we have drawn on the experiences of the fellows and many other teachers who have developed contemplative courses.

One Academic's Path to Contemplative Pedagogy

In 2008, coauthor Daniel Barbezat joined the center, first as a contemplative practice fellow and later as executive director. His story of why and how he brought contemplative practice into his teaching illustrates the potential these practices offer for academic renewal.

It is hard to say exactly how it happened, but over the years, I lost my way teaching economics. I knew the material and knew I could do the job of writing down and getting through a syllabus, but I could not say what I was really doing. Was I simply providing signals for the job market? Those students who did well in my class, who could follow instructions and think for themselves—was I training them to be fine hires? Or was I teaching a structured set of information, like those how-to programs available on late-night TV, bundled in a set of five DVDs? Was I guiding the students to think and write creatively, while the material was really immaterial? I could no longer tell. At one point, I realized that I was simply going through the motions and that if I couldn't find myself in my work, I should find other work.

Although I had the realization that I needed a change, I was stuck. I couldn't seem to figure out what I should do. So I called together my close friends to sit and be with me as I stated the issue and tried to work through it. I later realized that this is similar to the seventeenth-century Quaker “clearness committee” process. What I discovered during the weekend was that I was not inquiring about what was most meaningful to me and moving toward that in my work; rather, I was watching my actions and trying to discover what I was doing and getting nowhere.

I resolved to inquire about what mattered most to me and to try and integrate that into my teaching. I realized that contributing to well-being was critically important to me, but I didn't know what that had to do with economics. Well, on close examination, I became clear that it is the core of economics. After all, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to ensure well-being. It is the study of demand (namely, wanting and desire) and supply (what is or is produced). Suddenly my courses opened up to me. I thought of teaching economics in a new way and was looking for new approaches. At the same time, a colleague of mine, Paola Zamperini, told me that there was a strange-sounding center in nearby Northampton, Massachusetts, that was offering fellowships to professors interested in integrating contemplative practices into their classes. I was fortunate to receive a fellowship to create one of my favorite classes to teach, Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness. In that class and others, I came to realize that I could support environments that allowed students to embark on an inquiry similar to my own. Through the use of the practices, they could come to understand the material in both an abstract, analytical manner and from their own experience. They would find themselves in their own studies and relate what they are learning to what they hold most dear.

Without this grounding, education can be a rather empty process. We should not be shocked by the sort of wanton cheating and indifference that we see on campuses today, including the recent charge of over half of the 250 students in a Harvard course who have been accused of cheating: horrible in one way but a wonderful wake-up call for those willing to hear it. We all miss an important opportunity for self-reflection if we only shake our heads at what has happened to students over the years. These students are the product of our industrial model of education. If courses are merely commodities, then why should students hold them as special? Somehow we have lost our way in higher education and abandoned our mission to create lives of purpose and strong ethical and creative minds. Look at any university or college's mission statement, and you'll see they are filled with that sort of rhetoric. However, in the actual education, where does it happen? It mostly does not. We are cheating our students out of the opportunity to inquire deeply into their own meaning and find themselves in the center of their learning, thus providing them with a clear sense of the meaning of their studies. I hope that the practices in this book can help restore our purpose and make our courses as meaningful and exciting as I know they can be.

How to Use This Book

In this book, we introduce the use of contemplative and introspective methods that promote the exploration of meaning, purpose, and values and seek to serve our common human future. Personal introspection and contemplation reveal our inextricable connection to each other, opening the heart and mind to true community, deeper insight, sustainable living, and a more just society. As never before, we are faced with challenges that require both an understanding of technical and analytical reasoning and the ability to sustain inquiries into our connections to ourselves and others. Without a context to develop the awareness of the implications of our actions and a clear idea of what is most deeply meaningful to us, we will continue to act in ways that force us into short-term, myopic responses to a world increasingly out of control.

The book is divided into two parts. In part 1, we provide the theoretical and practical background of these practices, and in part 2, we describe and illustrate some of the many kinds of practices.

We begin in part 1 with background material, defining these practices and illustrating the quantitative and qualitative evidence of their benefits. In the past decade, an amazing surge of activity has coursed through neuroscience, cognitive and consciousness studies, health, social work, and education, providing a rich source of methods to assess the efficacy of contemplative practices. Next, we move to an extended, detailed example of these practices in an economics and a social work course. We hope that these examples illustrate how the practices can be tailored to work within the material and intentions of a specific course. Part 1 finishes with a set of cautions and concerns. As with any other practice, a number of problems can arise. Rather than attempt to catalogue all possible problems, chapter 4 addresses some of the main pitfalls.

Part 2 provides guidelines for establishing a contemplative practice of one's own and illustrates many of the practices used in the classroom. It does not attempt to describe every possible practice. Rather, it provides an overview of some of the major contemplative practices and gives some specific examples.

All the quotations from professors, unless otherwise indicated, are from reports and presentations prepared by them for the center.

We hope this book will serve as an introduction to those new to these practices and as a focusing resource for those more familiar with them. May it serve to transform education and foster the flourishing of the human spirit.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book describing the work of so many people across all of higher education is a daunting and wonderful task. The incredible community that has developed around contemplative pedagogy includes so many inspiring people that the danger of thanking some is to leave out many. To everyone in this growing community, please accept our deepest respect and thanks. Thanks especially to the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society Contemplative Practice Fellows for your work in developing programs, courses, and exercises that have challenged and inspired your students and colleagues. We recognize that we have not described the entire scope of your work here, but we hope this book will foster and deepen the contemplative approaches that you have been engaged in over the years.

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!

Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!