Reviewing an Arts-Based Contemplative Book Through Arts-Based Contemplative Practices

• In Event: 32.077 - Contemplative Approaches to Transforming Education: Engagement in Awake-Dreaming, Spiritual Activism, De/colonial Perspectives, and Mindfulness

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this presentation is to share the intent, rationale, and process of using an arts-based, contemplative reparative research framework to engage with and respond to the book, Arts-Based and Contemplative Practices in Research and teaching (2014) co-edited by Susan Walsh, Barbara Bickel, and Carl Leggo.

Perspectives
Using mindfulness research, contemplative practices, and arts integrated inquiry within a conceptual framework (blinded), the team of four co-researchers reviewed and responded to the publication. The team also interviewed the co-editors regarding their response to the book’s arts integrating review process. Collectively, the research team and co-authors generated questions and directions for future research.

Jon Kabat-Zinn (2003), most notably known for his work at the University of Massachusetts Medical School as the founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) claims that mindfulness is a state of being aware and focused on the present moment, with complete acceptance and recognition of the experience without attachment to thoughts or emotions that would otherwise regulate the experience (also see Paulson, Davidson, Jha, & Kabat-Zinn, 2013).

Mindfulness is a practice that allows individuals to increase attentional awareness, focus, and open monitoring of thoughts and emotions without engaging instantaneously and habitually. The ability to center awareness to greater levels has the potential to allow humans to access new ways of perceiving the world and the relationships in which they engage (Davidson & Kaszniak, 2015; Ericson, Kjonstad, & Barstad, 2014). Therefore, mindfulness has the possibility to be a powerful catalyst to improve the human condition through various psychological and social avenues.

Mindfulness provides a means of mediating interaction between the self and experience, by disrupting automatic mental processes and instead inserting a ‘stop’ (Fels, 2010) wherein the individual may observe and hold the experience in awareness non-judgmentally, thereby using all of the senses and cognitive awareness to experience the present moment as it is. Wiebe (2016) describes this Levisanian aporic moment wherein the researcher is at an irresolvable internal disjunction, face to face with a need to create a re-presentation of the encounter to establish an alternate prepositional position.

The conceptual model incorporates a process of direct questioning to generate meanings from the artist-researcher translations. Translations are artistic renderings of research data created to reveal or convey researcher inquiries and interpretations to the self and audience in aesthetic forms. These functional artefacts, in that they are artworks imbued with meaning or created for the sake of generating meanings, are intended to be used to provoke dialogue and trouble stop moments.

Modes of Inquiry
In this project, three silk and merino wool scarves were created for the co-authors as part of the reparative research response process. Each of the scarves re-present specific themes and investigations from the book.

Significance
This book response process has the potential impact of helping others imagine new possibilities for reviewing and engaging with scholarship through arts-based contemplative, reparative models that involve metaphor and imagination.

Figure 1. Nuno Felted Scarves. 2016. Artist: Blinded. (Pic in session document.)

Authors

• Pauline Sameshima, Lakehead University

• Muga Miyakawa, Lakehead University