Exploring Mindfulness to Reframe Our Practice: Positioning Our "Selves" Through Critical Friendship

• In Event: 26.072 - Self-Study Utilizing Critical Friends

Abstract

Self-study of teaching and teacher education practices requires researchers to position themselves in relation to both their history and their practice. We decided to use self-study methodology to interpret and analyze the effects of our mindfulness practices on our pedagogies of teacher education. We use the lens of critical friendship to both encourage the maintenance of mindfulness practices during the ups and downs of academic life and to help each other examine how an explicit focus on mindfulness in our professional and personal lives can stimulate new ways of thinking about teacher education. In so doing, we seek to identify and interpret both our assumptions about mindful practice and about teacher education.

Authors

• Diana Petrarca, UOIT

• Shawn M. Bullock, Simon Fraser University