What is Contemplative Education?
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Though powerful and vitally important, the conventional methods of scientific research, pedagogy, and critical scholarship need to be broadened. The experiential methods developed within the contemplative traditions offer a rich set of tools for exploring the mind, the heart, and the world. When they are combined with conventional practices, an enriched research methodology and pedagogy become available for deepening and enlarging perspectives, leading to lasting solutions to the problems we confront. None of these methods require an ideology or creed and each is available equally to all. (http://www.contemplativemind.org/about/vision: 1)
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This aspect of the Centre for Contemplative Mind in Society’s (CCMIS’s) vision above highlights central aspects of Contemplative Education as they differentiate it from the mainstream. The CCMIS suggests that Contemplative Education is experiential, holistic and when combined with related natural science methods provides a complete educational approach. A defining characteristic of Contemplative Education is its diversity: in the origins of its experiential practices, the disciplines that engage it and the methods that contemplative pedagogues use. In essence Contemplative Education involves the integration of contemplative practices, contemplative philosophies and contemplative orientations into any educational setting to support the development of the whole student and teacher.
It does this by helping them engage their first-person or subjective experience (which includes heightened somatic or bodily awareness) alongside the second or intersubjective and third-person or objective, cognitive and rational. It is described by Arthur Zajonc (2013) one of its founders in modern times, as the ‘quiet revolution’, though its exponential growth has meant that this educational revolution is getting louder.
Generally, there are three main ways that contemplative practices are incorporated, firstly, in a remedial manner where say a simple breath exercise will be used to help students relax and orient their focus on class content and exercises.
Generally, there are three main ways that contemplative practices are incorporated, firstly, in a remedial manner where say a simple breath exercise will be used to help students relax and orient their focus on class content and exercises.
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Contemplative Education is a “set of pedagogical practices designed to cultivate the potentials of mindful awareness and volition in an ethical-relational context in which the values of personal growth, learning, moral living and caring for others are also nurtured” (Roeser & Peck 2009, p. 127).
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Secondly, the physiological, psychological, philosophical and religious foundations of the practices will be taught, and lastly, a contemplative orientation will be developed in the class room or across the entire institution. If one understands that Contemplative Education encompasses these three aspects then I think that Robert Roeser and Stephen Peck provide a good definition. They suggest that it is a “set of pedagogical practices designed to cultivate the potentials of mindful awareness and volition in an ethical-relational context in which the values of personal growth, learning, moral living and caring for others are also nurtured” (Roeser & Peck 2009, p. 127).
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Importantly contemplative pedagogues need to be contemplative practitioners, for to teach it one needs to know it from the inside out. The contemplative pedagogues and theorists Robert Waxler and Maureen Hall call for teachers to use contemplative practices to connect with their students as:
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…whole persons, reaching their students on an emotional as well as an intellectual level. Such teaching can be pictured as an organic process, which evolves in connection to the immediate and ongoing context. We see such teaching as an embodied process...[providing]…teaching and learning modes, which are capacious enough to hold heart and mind, thoughts and feelings.” (2011, p. 100)
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The recent re-emergence of this ancient educational orientation, which can be traced back to Pre-historic indigenous rites of passage that used trance, is said to have begun in 1995 with the opening of the Centre for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (CCMIE), Northampton, Massachusetts (Please see my history of contemporary contemplative education below). Just 20 years later nearly every disciplinary “area of higher and professional education from Poetry to Biology and from Medicine to Law is being taught with contemplative exercises” (Zajonc, 2013, p. 84). As a philosophical approach and pedagogy it provides a wide range of theoretical and educational methods that increase focus and metacognition (Hart, 2008), improve attention (Jha, 2007), cognition (Zeidan et al., 2010) and cognitive flexibility (Moore, 2009), reduce stress and anxiety (Shapiro et al., 1998) and support student attention, emotional balance, empathetic connection, compassion, and altruism (Zajonc, 2013).
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Contemplative Education is aligned with Somatic, Integral and Transformative Education and has its origins in the Wisdom Traditions and work of educational pioneers such as Rudolf Steiner, John Dewey and Maria Montessori. It is described as holistic and progressive and contrasted with mainstream or conventional forms of education that focus on the acquisition of knowledge, development of cognitive skills and individual achievement. The need for contemplative education is predicated on the failure of educational systems that accentuate a ‘curriculum of content’, over understandings of the whole student and teacher and the process of learning.
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Contemplative Education is described as holistic and progressive and contrasted with mainstream or conventional forms of education that focus on the acquisition of knowledge, development of cognitive skills and individual achievement.
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It is suggested that this lack of holism has resulted from an over emphasis in education on positivistic approaches founded on the scientific method. This echoes a theme common in Humanities discourse related to the influence of Cartesian thinking. I’ve termed this a politics of subjectivity, which I suggest originated in the Industrial Revolution with the division of state and church, body and mind. The developmental psychologist and contemplative theorist Mark Greenberg describes the result of these partitions in education as the, “age of the whole child left behind” (Greenberg, et al., 2008, p. 2). Contemplative Education works to ameliorate this through its practices, which not only help reduce stress and enhance focus, but support the development of the self- or meta-awareness required for ethical and empathic engagement in the world.
On the face of it Contemplative Education has grown in response to the increasing pressures that students and teachers are suffering particularly, time poverty, information overload and constant connectivity, which are resulting in chronic stress and anxiety, constant partial attention (CPA) (See: http://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/), fragmented thinking leading to the inability to focus and a lack or sense of meaning.
Contemplative practices provide methods to train forms of single tasking or focus that heighten self-awareness and metacognition, lessen stress and anxiety and support the reintegration of fragmented attention.
Contemplative practices provide methods to train forms of single tasking or focus that heighten self-awareness and metacognition, lessen stress and anxiety and support the reintegration of fragmented attention.
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Underpinning this are issues related to much of our current education system that have arisen out of economic rationalism, driven by the hyper-materialistic culture we live in. These issues have led to the instrumentalism of education with, in many instance, it being almost entirely content driven. The corrective to this is as Arthur Zajonic states, “A more robust and complete ontology, investigated by a broad range of methods, and a more inclusive ethics that gets beyond cost benefit” (2013, p. 93).
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Contemplative practices provide methods to train forms of single tasking that heighten self-awareness and metacognition, lessen stress and anxiety and support the reintegration of fragmented attention.
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An important white paper in psychology and Contemplative Education research was written by the psychologist Shauna Shapiro and her colleagues in 2008 is Toward the Integration of Meditation in Higher Education: A review of research evidence written by. It provides a good overview of the field drawing on four decades of research into the benefits of meditation in education.
They divided their key findings into three categories: ‘Cognitive and Academic Performance’, where they found positive impacts on academic achievement; ‘Mental Health and Psychological Well-being’, showing that contemplation can help regulate emotional reactions, and what they term the ‘development of the whole person’, with contemplation enhancing interpersonal skills and creativity.
They divided their key findings into three categories: ‘Cognitive and Academic Performance’, where they found positive impacts on academic achievement; ‘Mental Health and Psychological Well-being’, showing that contemplation can help regulate emotional reactions, and what they term the ‘development of the whole person’, with contemplation enhancing interpersonal skills and creativity.
