BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Highlighted Session: The Power of Contemplative Learning for Integrating our Body, Heart, Mind and Spirit, and for Radical Re-envisioning of Education

Mon, February 20, 9:30 to 11:00am EST (9:30 to 11:00am EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Declaration Level (1B), Declaration B

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

We are facing tremendous challenges in the world, in all fronts and areas, that are directly threatening the survival of the human species and the survival of other species on Earth. We are having a moral crisis, with many living in a spiritual wasteland, suffering mental breakdown; we witness daily impacts in our society from moral bankruptcy, ruthless pursuit of personal gains, and a pervasive sense of fear and despair. We are in need of making a contemplative turn, a turn inward to find solutions. For thousands of years, humanity has been searching for meaning and purpose, which lays the foundation for world religions and many spiritual practices. In the last three centuries, with the Industrial Revolution, we have established a capitalist economic system which encourages life pursuits for wealth, fame and power, to the point that we are destroying nature, and causing great social class and racial inequality, and many other kinds of inequities. We have the knowledge that we are holistic beings, that we have a body, mind, heart, and spirit. However, in education, we have played down the importance of our body, heart and spirit by focusing almost exclusively on the mind, the rational and analytical mind, separating ourselves from the things we study, and treating our body and emotions as irrelevant, taking the inner world exploration as forbidden zones. In a way, we can say we have fostered heartless and spiritless forms of education, which are behind the problems that are discussed above.

It is in this background that a course was started in the summer of 2016 by Dr. JL. This course is designed to provide students with first-hand, embodied experiential learning that focus on doing, being, intuition, feeling, and inner observations and reflections. First person learning such as students engaging in meditation, yoga, tai chi, storytelling and dance, among others, is emphasized, alongside third person learning focusing on literature study. The class also emphasizes second person learning which bridges the first and third person learning, with students and instructors engaging in dialogues between what we read and how we feel. Students take active roles in designing contemplative activities, learning about different methods, and applying them in dealing with various kinds of issues, and envisioning a new world.

This panel is formed by two instructors and several students who took the class in the summer of 2022 with one who took it in previous years. The instructors will share their contemplative practice which prompted them to feel the urgent need for a course that helps students to learn and grow holistically, how they designed curriculum and planned activities and goals that are to be achieved for both personal growth and enhanced abilities for social transformation. The students will share what they have learned from a course graduate course taught by one of the instructors, Dr. JL, and the programs or activities that they have designed as a result of taking the course, for immediate implementation or for future actions. Audience will witness how the students go deeply inward and let their imagination fly as they are doing profound work of equity, social justice, healing and educational re-envisioning.

For example, one student designs contemplative practices for young children to calm down and connect with their body and heart, and to be joyful and creative. Audience will learn about this wonderful meditation video designed for children with autism as well as for all other children and teachers. This video is 30 minutes in length, including four main sections: meditation, yoga, dance improvisation, and gratitude sharing. The students are guided to feel their own feelings, let their unique, creative talents emerge, build their confidence, fully express who they are, and share their love and gratitude.

One student forms ideas about a school that is for love and that disrupts hierarchies of learning. The school, called Casa Lila, is where those raised in poverty can live a dignified life. It will be a space where the visible (physical, material world) and the invisible (our inner and spiritual world) are cherished; a place where feelings and things are part of the same world. Casa Lila is a place of peace and joy where human beings and other non-human beings are all part of the community, showing that the energy of the world is creative and has no boundaries. The student will share how she has painfully witnessed incredible inequity from early childhood in her home country and how she finally formulated her idea about the school through doing the final project in this class. She planned to build the school after she got her doctoral degree.

One student was so inspired by the course that she started to work with the students in the course to form a student organization advocating holistic learning and being for students, faculty, and staff throughout the campus. She and the other students are now actively laying the groundwork for the student organization. They have already taken action to connect with groups on campus and will implement some initiatives in the Fall. The student presenter will share the practical strategies the group has been working on related to partner identification, rapport building, funding search, and community building.

Finally, a student will share how she has been managing a contemplative multifaith religious center and meditative garden on campus. She took the summer course a few years ago and was greatly impacted by it. She will especially examine the role of the garden space in providing an emotional breathing space for students during the COVID-19 pandemic, as made evident through students’ journal writings placed in the garden from the period.

Overall, the panel will provide illustrative examples on how a contemplative inquiry and holistic education course can be designed and executed, and how students are not passive learners but powerful agents of change through inner self transformation attending to their body, mind, heart, and spirit. Students and teachers both grow from such contemplative quest and journey.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations