Clueless

...is what I am often.

Somehow I managed to completely forget about the earlier applications of mindfulness to teaching that I learned about 'when back when in the Fall of 2014' through the University of Iowa exploratory group for mindfulness in education.

• Specifically, I was reminded by a contact from that group that I can have a variety of mindfulness/awareness based activities that can be related to findings from the text.  For instance, when discussing normative changes related to social media, students can simply be 'aware' of patterns and usage and how this impacts their lives/makes them feel.  Those findings can be reflected on and linked back to the text.  Likewise, these inquiries can extend to things like food choices (and linked to readings on bureaucracy or the environment), health insurance status, educational opportunities, political practices, etc., and the text.

Biking and camping

Per my 'individual change' projects I would like students to complete, I am engaging in my own efforts to eat/drink locally (and giving up expensive, shipped kombucha), bike (rather than drive) as much as possible, and...go camping.  A bit by way of background as to why this is significant:

I didn't learn to bike until I was almost 35 years old.  To join those who are increasingly commuting via bike rather than car is then pretty significant (according to Census data, bike to work commuting has increased from 488,000 people in 2000 to 882,198 people in 2013).

As for camping, I want contemplative education to confront the notion that we are separate from our natural environment (rather than a part of it!).  I believe that issue is applicable to all classes.  However, just like I needed a spiritual experience to see the infusion of spirit in curricula, I need a natural experience to infuse nature in curricula.  So...as much as I fear spiders and bodily functions without 'modern' comforts, I must plan a camping trip (Mel says she has a tent and sleeping pad, which should get us/me started).

The Yoda of all assignment lists?

So much reform in curricula for the fall in order to infuse spirit, sense of purpose/self, and experience in education.

• I'll be trying the 'sit beside' instead of 'stand over' model.
• We'll invoke a variety of personal/group change, experiential (e.g., explorations in nature, service learning agency profiles), non-profit agency research, historical (tax rates per "Inequality for All")and cross-cultural comparison research (e.g., Denmark homelessness, health insurance, education, and taxation), interview, current event, example/application, lectio divina reflection pieces etc., in dynamic engagement with the text.  Where engagement with the text contradicts research or experience, the approach will be one of questioning rather than assuming that I have the right answers.
• Assignments will ask students to work toward figuring out how they want to relate to the world now (e.g., what they do/buy) and in the future (e.g., their contribution in the work world that supports their spirit).  Again, I cannot decide this for them.  I can only use theory and the text to help them learn what questions to ask in their lives.  Clearly, I do not have all of the answers myself and need not be conceived of as the source of all learning!
• Class assignments must retain hope.  As stated in Nature and the Human Soul (henceforth NHS) by Lewis Carroll (pg. 456) from "Alice in Wonderland" "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."  Likewise, Einstein (same pg.) "No problem can be solved fromt he same level of consciousness that created it."  On pg. 313 of NHS, Vaclav Havel also states: "Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul.  Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not hte same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.  The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is."  As noted on pg. 25 of CTL (see next paragraph), while 'great and all,' "critical thinking, when it becomes an ethic, can turn into a metaphysics of nihilism or a psychology of pessimism...like a carefully employed butcher knife hacks the whole animal to pieces.  Contemplative teaching teaches on the other side of critical thinking...where affirmation is again possible."  After all, "contemplation of our subjects teaches that freedom is always a freedom to love, and that love must always spring from an inner freedom." (pg. 27).

Per the issue Contemplative Teaching and Learning (henceforth CTL with citations from pg. numbers though an edited volume) from the journal New Directions for Community Colleges, future assignments will focus heavily on the above as well as much slower, more deliberate, and in-depth reflection on readings. Reflection, contemplation, and spiritual integration (not in the religious, but in the life purpose sense) benefits teacher, administrator, and student (pg. 19,92-93).  Future work can further explore (along with KCELT, admissions, and counseling services) how contemplative practices might improve campus climate.  [Quotes in section immediately below all from CTL.]

• Rather than quantity, we will focus on quality and depth of reading with frequent reflection assignments that apply or analyze (see second bullet above).  Passages of text will be "reflection" pieces per lectio divina (pgs. 14, 34, 44).  The authors of all entries suggest contemplative learning is most apt for the fragmented lives of community college students.  Reflection assignments will likely start on the first day of class.
• All of the quoted passages in this blog (and the others noted here from NHS and CTL) can be the source of lectio divina reflections.  Likewise, the textbook and other texts (e.g., the fabulous quote near the beginning of Occupy Spirituality re: the enduring myth of the meritocracy) should be the source of material for lectio divina.
• Assignments will ask how what we are studying impacts what is going on with students' lives in the present and how it is connected to history and other people in a bit picture way (pg. 22).  One instructor (pg. 24) asks students to consider: "Although this course fulfills a requirement, I can make it my own by_____________________?"
• Noting Berry's (pg. 37) observation that "community cannot survive under the rule of competition" (as is the case for present economic systems [this could be a reflection quote for any class as well!]), the classroom is a sangha and needs spiritual healing.  I plan to use metta (loving kindness meditation) to help support/heal individuals and our classroom community (pg. 36).  We will direct happiness and peace to ourselves and to all beings faced with the difficult subject matter we will address.
• We will try to remember solutions are not dualistic though society presents them this way and will instead focus on questioning and pondering the multiplicity of solutions available beyond the limiting, dualistic options.  We will remember that "listening is loving" (according to "Hector...and the Search for Happiness").
• We will study (again, possibly as early as the first week of class) the limits of all dualistic or fixed labels in society.  The problems of socially constructed 'divide and conquer' identities will be a recurring theme.
• The syllabus and assignments will leave many things independent and unstructured to reflect our fluidity (pg. 84-85).  We will have specific discussions about the anxiety this might generate and talk about how to address this.  Likewise, we will talk about any anxiety concerning the 'sit beside' rather than 'stand over' model of education and challenges to assumptions about a 'sole source of learning.'

• Building on the work of Palmer and Fox, we will explore education as a means to find your life's path in a way that is spiritually rewarding as well as remunerative.  We will ask "what am I meant for" and "how can I be for myself and also for others" (pg. 103, CTL).  Since our subject is sociology which relates to all aspects of life in community including vocation, we will be exploring our subject matter as also an issue of vocatio that will fulfill students as they age rather than leaving them at age 40 wondering about their life's purpose (see pg. 238, 255-7, and 316-7 of NHS).  This level of reflection is one of the predicating tenets of Nature and the Human Soul (NHS) [quotes below are from NHS).

NHS (as well as CTL on pg. 107) also advocates strongly for the return to nature (and an 'ecocentric' orientation) as a balance to the 'culture-centric' model in modern society (pg. 4-5).  [To this end, I will camp!  Just like with the spirit, if you want to return to nature, you have to have an experience in nature.  D'uh.]  We can use lectio divina on various passages from NHS including those that argue we suffer from our alienation from the natural world (these also sound a bit like Marx and can be used with free association on capitalism, communism, and socialism) (pg. 6-7).  According to NHS, a truly actualized society is not necessarily a "developed" society (use pg. 7, 46-47, 210 (and globalization here), 448-9, 452-4 for in-class reflections on this) but rather one that learns to balance culture with the realities of our interbeing/dependence with the natural.

• A course inspired by NHS will be "soulcentric" in the sense that it is "designed to assist all members in discovering and living from their deepest and most fulfilling potentials in this way contributing their most life-nourishing gifts to their community and environment."  More broadly, then, "a society that is soulcentric is necessarily ecocentric" since the individual's place is always "granted and revealed by nature.  In so doing, the society roots itself in the natural world.  the greater Earth community is accurately understood as the locus of every person's first membership...[with] interconnectedness with everything else."  Thus, "to say that a culture is ecocentric is to say that its customs, traditions, and practices are rooted in an awareness of radical interdependence with all beings." (pg. 45).  This is in contrast with the typical, egocentric models on which we can also reflect (pg. 224-5).  We can use the passages on pg. 124 and 126-7 to explore the social construction of such things as ADHD within the 'nature-deficit' model proposed.  We can wonder how a mind orientation (rather than nature) might be harming our (and our children's) ability to care about life (pg. 126-7).  We can reflect on the importance of identifying with place and with how this allows us to be our fully integrated selves rather than just consumers convinced of our fundamental separation from "nature" (pg. 144-145, 155-7, AND 261 [re: consumption of material resources] passages for lectio divina).
• Relatedly, we can try the exercises on pg. 158-160 in all classes to see how we might reestablish a connection to our environment rather than remaining separate and isolated from it.
• We can try the exercises on pg. 195 and 196 also to try to learn more about our connection in terms of the plants, animals, and food sources around us.
• Additionally, we might investigate pg. 205 to see what we think of the divisions of 'masculine' and 'feminine.'  [Eh hem.]
• Contemplation via reflection (lectio divina) and meditation (metta, mindfulness as a means to awareness and a "pause" in the action before reacting) also helps us to practice questioning, curiosity, beginner's mind, and innocence (child's mind) in our pursuits.  We will be better apt to be equanimous rather than reactive as a result of our awareness of sensation, thought, and interconnection (pg. 106).
• For quote on syllabus?:  "Not all those who wander are lost" (J.R.R. Tolkien).  Related to this (pg. 285), NHS advocates for experiencing (pg. 402-3) above all else and abandoning the preoccupation with self (or the "I, me, mine") in favor of seeing the interdependence of all.  We need to provide experiential, service learning, and volunteer activities for students with mentorship.  Students need 'employable skills,' but also the lived experiences that will allow them to take their place in an integrated, soul/eco-centric (rather than ego-) society (pg. 212).  Through ecocentric and soulcentric ways of being, we will arrive at service work that creates new and hopeful social institutions (pg. 292).  As a result of our experiences, we will act out our truth as part of nature (pg. 326).
• For those who think we have lost our minds focusing on our fundamental interdependence, we can remember Einstein's words (pg. 402) that "We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Assignment inspiration from "The Heart of Higher Education"

Palmer and Zajonc's book The Heart of Higher Education is helping with assignment generation.  The authors advocate for 'whole student' education of heart, mind, and body.  [I like to remember that no Eastern language has two words for 'heart' and 'mind' but rather considers them one in the same.]   In general, they want educators and administrators to be mindful of the fact that none of us is composed of independent, separate parts, but rather always part of a larger, interdependent whole.

In terms of job satisfaction and spiritual integrity for the practitioner, the authors importantly remind me that "we can choose the way we teach" (pg. 89).  We are able to incorporate spirit in the questions, reflections, experiences, etc. that we emphasize in class assignments. 

In terms of assignments, I am reminded:

• I would like students (especially in Introduction to Sociology, but maybe in all courses) to have a dedicated notebook for the course that they will use to record daily questions, etc. in relation to the text.  The notebook would be exchanged with a peer at the start of class.  The peer would share the example(s) they liked best or had a question about.  The sharing would facilitate praise for student work from another and also community building and accountability.
  
• In Introduction to LGBT Studies, I hope to have more student assignments be extensions of the text.  Rather than having students just use the text to illuminate cross cultural comparisons, I would like them to pick a country and research attitudes and laws further on their own to bring back and share with a partner.
  
• In all classes, I think it will be important to have larger projects (interview, experiential, personal or group change or service learning) that will be formally presented in class.
   

• To consider beginning each class with a social construction framework with respect to identity and duality.  I think it may be more important to identify, up front, the dangers of divisive, dualistic identity construction.  I would like to start out by challenging the 'solidity' of big identity structures (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and look at the damage done by reifying and creating inequality on the basis of these identities.  I would like to add the false duality of 'democrat' and 'republican' and the damage done by dualistic problem-solving approaches as well.
• I would like to integrate many 'thought' experiment assignments as advocated by the authors.  I no longer see the need for exams in sociology so much as for creative, imaginative, application and analysis based experiential assignments.  I could see using a derivation of the assignment on pg. 85 in Heart of... wherein students are asked to be mindful of consumption in considering daily costs (e.g., the cost of one latte could provide hydration therapy for 5 children in a developing country).
• Similarly, I would like to try the 'interbeing project' (pg. 85-86) whereby students observe in a service environment (e.g., fast food, big box store) and look at (without judgment) how shoppers are behaving.  The students then apply the same awareness/mindfulness to their own pattrns of consumption and compare.  For instance, "How attentive are they to what they are doing at any moment?  What would it mean for us if we were more aware of our consumption?"
• I also like the exercise on pg. 86 that employs technology to facilitate mindful consumption by asking students to use online resources available through smart phones, etc. to investigate products or practices just prior to consumption or use.
• As mentioned in an earlier blog, I also want to try the tonglen meditation and time for quiet reflection at the start/end of class mentioned in the appendix.  I think that students will grow to appreciate a brief silence to reflect.  I think they might truly enjoy the opportunity to direct 'peace' and 'happiness' to themselves as well as others (tonglen, as applied here, would allow them to send feelings of peace and happiness to those who are suffering as described in our readings and experiential assignments.

In all of these ventures, I see the authors affirming my desire to 'sit beside' rather than 'stand over' my students (pg. 171) upon my return.

In an institutional context, they suggest the importance of ambassadors helping to spread the word about mindfulness resources throughout the administration and faculty, which I would be excited to do via KCELT and other fall/winter faculty trainings.

And more thoughts from the retreat and "Active Hope"

In reading Active Hope this morning, I was reminded of a few other principles from the retreat I would like to implement in class.  It is important in discussing the problems of the world to remember that all is both infinitely hopeful and depressing at the same time.  For instance, present conditions for LGBT folks remain challenging at best and yet we are closer than I ever thought possible in my lifetime to receiving full marriage equality.  Likewise, conditions must be remembered as fluid and not static.  As mentioned in Active Hope, there is no static "this is how it is and will always be" but rather a process of noting where we are now, what we want to create, and what actions we must take in order to do so.  The authors remind that there can be subtle events that trigger massive shifts in the world ("discontinuous change") and also that almost all significant change goes through the process of first being treated as a joke before being considered a threat and finally as "normal" (this is certainly the case for marriage equality).

In addition to having students (especially in Introduction to Sociology) keep notebooks with their daily examples, questions, and reflections on the text readings, I would like to have Intro. and Social Problems students doing weekly, typed reports that incorporate interviews or experiences with the material.


Students would view problems in a step-wise manner and complete the following for each problem studied:

1. What is the present situation according to the text?
2. What would you like to be different?
3. When in the course of history and/or in a different location has it been different (research or interviews here)?
4. What is your role in making the changes you would like to see (think small in terms of life changes, e-mail, etc.)?
5. Choose one of the options you identified in question 4 and make the change.  Make a vow to do the change for a particular period of time as decided during class.  Record your progress, the impact you observed, and share your successes/challenges with others in the class (changes are more easily made with social support!).
6. Summarize the impact of the change and the feedback you received from others in class.  Identify next steps to complete this change (or talk about how you would modify it to be more successful based on feedback) and/or identify your next action step for completion (if you already successfully completed your first action).

Social Problems students would also complete "service learning profiles" of local agencies as done for national/global ones in their text as well as individual/group personal change projects as described above.

To infuse spirit into education...

...I learned that it helps to have a spiritual experience!

Turns out, as much as I read in the land of self-help and Buddhist dhamma, I just could not wrap my head around equanimity and egolessness without going through the experience of Vipassana meditation.

While the almost 12 day experience was the most arduous I've been through (imagine 11 hours in a single day thinking only about the sensations of the breath in the area above the upper lip!), it was also one of the most productive.  As I began to emerge from my own misery, I was left with the ability to again be of service to others.

In terms of my return to Kirkwood, I was also left with a clearer (though still exceptionally fluid) sense for where my classroom reforms must go in order to infuse spirit in sociology and higher education.  I feel strongly that duality of opinion and solution must be abandoned in favor of experiential sources of inspiration.
I see the need to design the curriculum around healing at all levels.  Amidst all of the pain and misery at the individual, societal, and natural levels, we must begin to identify what type of world we want in future and how to heal the one we have already created that is suffering so greatly.  I hope to start out with students getting to know each other better, but then getting to know themselves better.  I want them to identify ways that they (or their family) might be suffering and participate in solutions (e.g., service learning) to those problems.  I also want them to realize that they  are creating the future world in which they want to live and, therefore, must use the 15 weeks in the semester to carefully reflect on their role in that process.  Likewise, I hope they are able to reflect on their (capital J) job in the world not just in terms of vocation but in terms of service and spiritual nourishment.

Mindful undergraduates

The best thing about the silent retreat (Saturday, February 28th) conducted through the UIHC Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program was seeing all of the happy, mindful undergraduates involved.

During the debriefing after the retreat (when you are allowed to talk and make eye contact!), I spoke with two young men: One a physics and astronomy major and the other pre-med.  FIRST observations about the day for both of them were that they were "happy to not feel any pressure to respond to their phones or texts."

That response, along with the tonglen meditation used with classes by a practitioner in The Heart of Higher Education, makes me more inclined to try short meditations in class (see pg. 159-160).  I envision brief periods of "staying" at the end of class and periods of tonglen at the beginning.  The beginning meditation could start on day one with the sangha (or community-creating) goal of relieving the nervousness everyone feels about speaking in class.  It could later pertain more to course materials or current events and the relief of suffering in light of our interconnectedness.

I am finding The Heart of Higher Education to be more and more appropriate for a KCELT group and discussion as I feel many of the points raised are important things to consider both for the well being of professors and of students.  As it pertains to the former, the authors remind that community of practitioners is important to keep "fresh" the pedagogy as well as to provide support for those who are "experimenting."  As it pertains to the latter, the book's co-author, Arthur Zajonc, speaks about the importance of finding a mentor, community, and of "learning to animate what [he] was receiving" in college (pg. 55).  He quotes Emerson (pg. 55) adding:  

"We see only what we animate.  Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them."

According to the authors, animation is the result of lived (stories, emotions) and experiential (service learning, etc.) connection to the material.  Ultimately the authors wish for students to have a contemplative college education that allows them to divine the meaning of life, their place in it, and how they are meant to serve (vocation) the world.  The quote (pg. 49) that seems particularly applicable to sociology as a discipline in this mission is: "Giving students knowledge as power over the world while failing to help them gain the kind of self-knowledge that gives them power over themselves is a recipe for danger."

The book's authors are generally advocating "integrated education" as a means of producing students that are engaged and not distanced from the material or from each other.  In the course of engaging critiques of the inclusion of 'emotion' or 'humanity' in the classroom, they remind that "a large percentage of the people who oversaw the murder of six million Jews had doctoral degrees from some of the 'great' universities of the era.  We need to understand how integrative forms of teaching and learning can mitigate against educational travesties and tragedies such as this" (pg. 32). Likewise, they caution against classroom discourse that allows for dualistic us/them "fascism of the heart that would kill off anyone who threatens my cherished world view- not with a gas chamber, but with a mental or verbal dismissal that renders that person irrelevant to my life" (pg. 32).  Overall, integrative education is designed to have students "think the world together rather than think it apart, to know the world in a way that empowers educated people to act on behalf of [spiritual and intellectual] wholeness rather than fragmentation" (pg. 22).

Crucial to me at present is the emphasis on contemplation in education (via mindfulness and meditation) as a means of taking care of both teacher and student.  Without awareness of inner worlds, one is unable to respond (rather than react) to the state of outer worlds.  Noting the critique of a former Harvard dean that "students are not soulless, but their university is," the authors share a Yale Law School dean's assertion that "a college is not just a place for the transmission of knowledge but a form for the exploration of life's mystery" (pg. 3).  They ask whether "current educational efforts address the whole human being- mind, heart, and spirit- in ways that contribute best to our future on this fragile planet" (pg. 5) as well as whether education helps "students move past fragmentation and develop a sense of motivation and purpose in the world?" (pg. 7).

For both student and professor, the authors demand that education (pg. 11):

"...[place] primacy of the participating observer whose experiences and relationships form the core of the new sciences.  This emphasis on the lived experience of the scientific 'observer' links the power of scientific knowing with the feelings we have...and the compassion we feel for those who suffer, a shift of perspective whose implications are pivotal for higher education.  In this view, the relationships and experiences of our lives- and the lives of our students- are not dismissed as irrelevant or inconsequential but are fully granted their own standing as building blocks of reality."

In order to achieve the integrated education described in the book, both the focus of teaching and the teacher must be as integrated in mind and body as possible.  I will confess to spending the majority of my time in the classroom thus far abjectly lacking said integration.  I plan to participate in the activities (and many assignments as well) of my students in order to keep me accountable to my fragile, but inchoate, integration.  Ultimately, we must live in a way that reflects that we are "a dynamic whole whose faces are many but whose core is single" (pg. 70) if we are to be happy and healthy in relation to ourselves, each other, other sentient beings, and the Earth as a whole.