With Mindfulness as a Guide: Engaging Conversations in Teacher Education

• In Event: Reflections on Engaging Culture, Race, and Spirituality

Abstract

Two questions guide this chapter: How does using spirituality as a lens to position our teaching in teacher education allow for “honest and meaningful dialogue around race and identity”? And in what ways does critical spirituality invite us “to see the importance of, to acknowledge, and to embrace difference?”
The author’s concept of spirituality is informed by mindfulness and Buddhist teachings. Mindfulness is the process of moving away from automatic pilot or scripted/habitual responses based on our own cultural frames of reference toward conscious communication that seeks to understand our interactions with others (Gudykunst & Kim, 2003). The author practices Engaged Buddhism, founded by Thich Nhat Hahn, which focuses on our active involvement in ending suffering.
The author describes her use of Engaged Buddhism with teachers as the act of self-reflection (meditation) and dialogic reflection (Dharma sharing) that occurs within her class as a pathway to engage with race and identity politics and to learn about power and privilege in education so we can work toward reducing and hopefully ending practices, conscious or unconscious, that perpetuate suffering in schools.
The author, writing as a White woman who prepares predominantly White teachers to work in urban and diverse communities, asserts that providing a space to discuss power and privilege as they relate to race, identity, and inequity in education has become critical. If our goal is to truly develop critical educators for social change, then we must model the practices we want students to enact regardless of race, class, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. The author identifies critical spirituality as a lens that can guide our intentions and, in this chapter, illustrates the ways enacting critical spirituality in her teaching provides a way to invite dialogue about race identity formation and politics in education for teacher education students.
The author identifies being in touch with who we are as cultural beings as important to the work. She asserts that her own journey with students in teacher education programs has taught her that many students have not had the opportunity to think of themselves as racialized or cultured beings, particularly within the context of education. The author goes on to argue that to promote dialogue about race and identity politics, one must first start with the self: Know thyself. This then becomes the gateway for understanding the other. In order to accomplish this, she has her students engage in the journey of mapping their ethnic and language history. In hearing each other’s stories they become open to hearing stories of historically marginalized communities because they are in touch with the emotions of their heritage and can make the connection with suffering and the process of Americanization that has occurred in their own lineage and in our collective lineage. From this point, they are able to embark on the journey of talking about race, identity, and culture because they have unpacked our collective identities, which becomes a starting point to dialogue about identities of past and present.

Author

• Barbara J. Dray, University of Colorado - Denver