Using Contemplative Pedagogies to Enhance Authentic Engagement and Personal Authenticity in the Sociology Classroom

• In Event: 2322 - Activities and Techniques Poster Session

Abstract

Sociology classrooms often necessitate that students bring a willingness to both engage with controversial, charged, and challenging topics, and do so with an awareness of their own background and characteristics that shape their perspectives and how they are perceived by others. Furthermore, faculty often aspire for class discussions to feel authentic and genuine, including students’ descriptions of their lived realities and beliefs. Fostering the ability for students to engage authentically and with personal authenticity, a sense of displaying one’s true self, is a teaching and learning challenge. An approach that may aid faculty in this aim is the incorporation of contemplative pedagogies, approaches that emphasize mindful awareness. Contemplative pedagogies invite students to consider aspects of self and identity that may be excluded in more traditional classroom practices. Contemplative pedagogy is about the interaction that occurs in the classroom and acknowledges both the students’ and teacher’s characteristics of self. This focus on interaction distinguishes contemplative pedagogy from both contemplative teaching, which focuses on the practices of the teacher, and contemplative learning which focuses on the practices of the student. The purpose of this work is to link theoretical and empirical research on authenticity with scholarship on contemplative pedagogies and propose ways to implement contemplative pedagogies in the sociology classroom. The synthesis of these literatures suggests that through the utilization of contemplative pedagogies, faculty members can invite students into interactions that enhance the experiences of both the faculty member and students and enhance authenticity. Such approaches may increase inward looking thinking, sense of connectedness, and outward looking engagement. Through examples of applied contemplative pedagogies in the sociology classroom, the author demonstrates how contemplative pedagogies may allow faculty members and students to consider themselves and each other more holistically and, in turn, approach each other and course material in a transformed way.

Author

• Alexis T. Franzese, Elon University