Articles and Videos
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Inner Dimensions of the New Economy
This is a 15 minute recording of my conference presentation, at the 2017 New Economy Network of Australia Conference - on the importance of engaging our inner landscape and subjective experience in the New Economy. It provides a definition of the Inner Dimension and offers suggestions for why it is important to engage this foundational ground of learning and change as we transition from the old to the new economy. |
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Contemplative Mathematics
This is a video presentation on contemplative mathematics that outlines a contemplative approach to mathematics pedagogy and gives a brief overview of two small experiments that used contemplative and creative practices |
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Contemplative practice in the law school: Breaking barriers to learning and resilience
By Dr Prue Vines and Dr Patricia Morgan In this chapter we argue that the increasing use of contemplative practices in law schools is significant not just in relation to enhancing resilience and diminishing stress and depression, but that they also have major benefits in the development of traditional legal roles. However, there is an attitudinal barrier that needs to be overcome as law students and legal academics have commonly been resistant to the use of these practices. It is interesting and somewhat ironic, therefore, that just as we are developing some level of openness to practices that often seem alien to those in the law, we also find evidence that they indeed enhance capacities for legal and educational practice such as level of focus, ability to prioritise, the optimisation of objectivity, higher order thinking and so on. Further, the management of ethical issues of professional practice, which are frequently triggers for depression, may also be improved by contemplative practices as they enhance students’ and lawyers’ ability to articulate their personal and professional ethics. In turn, this knowledge can be used to help break down remaining barriers to the use of contemplative practices within the legal academy. To reiterate, until recently the supposition was that the remedial benefits of contemplative practices ameliorated negative aspects of legal education and practice. However, now it appears that the enhancement may also be linked to a direct correspondence between contemplation and the law. Read More... |
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Following Contemplative Education Students’ Transformation Through Their ‘‘Ground-of-Being’’ Experiences
Author: Patricia Fay Morgan This article examines a recurring phenomenon in students’ experience of contemplation in contemplative and transformative education. This ground-of-being phenomenon, which has been reported by students in higher and adult education settings, is a formative aspect of the positive changes they reported. It is examined here to highlight the ways in which the depth of felt or precognitive meaning that can occur in contemplative education impacts these changes. The subtlety and range of contemplative experience is described through the ground-of-being experience as a means to support the call from contemplative and transformative education theorists for pedagogies that include the subjective and contemplative. Read More... |
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Per-(Me-Thou)—ability
Foundations of tntersubjective Experience in Contemplative Education Author: Patricia Morgan This chapter examines intersubjective experience in contemplative education, describing foundational and ethical aspects of this core aspect of contemplative education. Read More... |
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Learning Feelings: Foundations of Contemplative Education, phD Thesis
Author: Patricia Fay Morgan The proposed ineffability of subjective experience has meant that it is frequently absent in educational discourse, where the emphasis is on objective and rational acquisition of knowledge. This prevailing conception of knowledge leaves the pre-predicative foundations of learning neglected, which this thesis challenges by foregrounding the subjective contemplative experience of its ‘co-researchers’ (i.e. ‘participants’). In doing this, it reveals a subjective interrelational realm, intersecting and being intersected by the objective that grounds learning through contemplation. This project, sited in the holistic approach of contemplative education, critically examines the co-researchers’ experience of this realm. Its interdisciplinary phenomenological approach and methods provided access to the co-researchers’ contemplative interior experience. The rich data resulting from these methods revealed their development of feeling languages and maps, which they used to navigate their inner landscapes. Recognising the importance of these metaphorical languages led to the central findings of this thesis. Despite the co-researchers’ struggle at times to define their contemplative experience, what they reported is suggestive of a contemplative synaesthesia, or their experience of gestalts of affective, somatic, cognitive and transcendent modes of being. I have termed the process that I believe underpins these gestalts, the feeling nexus. Further I suggest that the feeling nexus resides in an elemental ground-of-being, and that contemplative engagement with both provides a sense of integration that founds the positive outcomes of contemplative education. This project’s exploration of the feeling nexus starts with a phenomenological and Yogic examination of an interrelational or ecological body, made permeable by the interspersion of its contexts. Its interrelational nature provides access to the feeling nexus, while contemplative experience of it frequently initiates a trajectory through contemplation where new meaning arises through pre-predictive, somatic and cognitive phases of meaning making. This study’s translation of the co-researchers’ experience in each of these stages is a unique approach that traces their creation of new meaning through contemplation. It offers a schema of learning through feelings for contemplative pedagogy, and a conception of subjective contemplative experience that contributes to an ontology of consciousness, which is currently missing from contemplative education theory. Read More... |
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Cultivating The Ineffable: The Role Of Contemplative Practice In Enactivist Learning
Authors: Patricia Morgan, Dor Abrahamson Abstract: Formalization of experience as on experience itself—the preconceptual and conscious sensations that are to be symbolized. Examining the nature of the sensations students experience as they engage in pedagogical activities appears to be a useful endeavor for any research program oriented to understanding how these sensations may give rise to conceptual knowledge. Yet this area of research is relatively under-represented in the literature. How should researchers conceptualize students’ pre-symbolic experience? Drawing on enactivist perspectives, we view the cognitive activity of pre-symbolic reasoning as constituted of embodied, situated action, whence meanings arise (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). As such, we investigate the source of mathematical meanings by looking to students’ phenomenology of pre-conceptual experience and asking how these experiences rise to consciousness such that they can then be symbolized. We submit that students’ first challenge in modeling their experience, antecedent to mathematical symbolization, is that of accessing their pre-conceptual experience, a bottleneck, we maintain that has largely been overlooked. Read More... |
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A Brief History of the Current Reemergence of Contemplative Education
Author Patricia Fay Morgan Abstract: This article explores the history of the current reemergence of a contemplative orientation in education. While referencing an ancient history, it primarily examines the history of contemporary contemplative education through three significant stages, focusing on the third. The first was arguably initiated by the introduction of Buddhism to the United States through Chinese immigration that started in 1840, and the second began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the establishment of three significant tertiary institutions that engage contemplative practice and theory. The third, which began in 1995 with the founding of the Centre for Contemplative Mind in Society, is introduced through five developmental influences. Linked with this is the concurrent development and growing intersection of contemplative and transformative education. This contemporary and ancient history traces the continuing presence of the contemplative in education to counter suggestions that contemplative education may be a fleeting trend. Rather, it indicates that contemplative practice, which grounds this approach in education, is an essential aspect of who we are and how we learn. Read More... |
