The July ACMHE Webinar: Restoring Our Attention with Beck Tench
In this webinar, we will take a look at the market forces that incentivize technology to distract an...
3 Steps for Building & Evaluating Successful Contemplative Programs
This webinar is designed for anyone interested in discovering the 3 essential steps for developing, implementing and evaluating sustainable contemplative programs and pedagogical approaches in the classroom or educational community.
Read MoreIn Support of Changes to the Smith College Admission Policy
This past Saturday, the trustees of Smith College voted to admit transgender women to the college. We applaud this decision: honoring self-identification is an important political statement that, we believe, will foster greater freedom and expression for all.
Read MoreFocusing on Justice
As we create liberatory, anti-racist contemplative pedagogies, classrooms, and institutions, our efforts must be rooted in a focused commitment to understanding our individual experiences, the experiences of others, and how our experiences relate to the political, social/cultural, and economic systems in which we participate.
Read MoreBe. Still. Move: Creative Contemplative Movement
A webinar on using movement, storytelling, and art to discover students’ embodied knowledge, develop a connection to personal body/mind insights, and internalize new knowledge.
Read MoreChallenges and Opportunities in Contemplative Higher Education
In this webinar, Carolyn Jacobs and Mirabai Bush engage in a dialogue about their experience teaching students in Smith College’s Contemplative Clinical Practice Advanced Certificate Program.
Read MoreChallenging Racism and Oppression in Academia
We are witnessing the dawning of a broader awareness of what many of us have lived and known firsthand: that for far too long, systemic racism has been under-acknowledged. The origins and manifestations of injustice in our nation’s history, in our contemporary culture, and especially in our own individual actions, need to be examined and challenged.
Read MoreDeveloping Indicators for What Matters Most in Your Teaching
This webinar explores our intentions for using contemplative practices in higher education, including what matters most to us as instructors, what matters most to our students, and how we can know if contemplative pedagogy is effective.
Read MoreTowards an Embodied Social Justice: Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy
In this webinar, Beth Berila explores how contemplative practices can deepen feminist and critical race pedagogies in Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and other courses about diversity, power, and oppression.
Read MoreContemplative Practice in a Course on Arguing as an Art of Peace
For the past seven years, Barry Kroll has been teaching a Lehigh University seminar that asks first-year college students to consider how arguing—so often associated with controversy and conflict—can be practiced as an art of peace. This webinar features student voices from the course.
Read MoreUsing Contemplative Practices to Promote Well-Being and Social Justice Awareness
Michelle Chatman shares contemplative practices used in sociology and anthropology classes to deepen student learning, enhance well-being, and inspire a commitment to social justice.
Read MoreIntention and Imagination in Higher Education
A challenge for integration in education is the joining of past experience with the innovative spirit of the present. Universities should be a prime venue for such imaginative and integrative work, where a true stimulus in the direction of new insights, and creations, is given to the minds and hearts of those who are part of its community.
Read MoreFostering Contemplative Life Skills on a College Campus Outside the Classroom
Helen Damon-Moore and colleagues at Dartmouth College present their work on developing contemplative programs through a variety of departments and services on their campus.
Read MoreSupport the Center on Valley Gives Day
The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society is one of the hundreds of nonprofits participating in the second annual Valley Gives Day, scheduled for this Thursday, December 12, 2013.
Read MoreShakespeare, Relevance, and “the Canon”
I wanted to share a little breakthrough I had with integrating contemplative pedagogy into one of the “majors” courses I teach, an introductory course on Shakespeare.
Read MoreThe Value of What I Teach
What don’t you know about what you know? I invite my students interested in writing out of their own experiences to explore that question. Is there any value to the state, the nation, the world in an academic environment in which students are encouraged to ask that question again and again?
Read MoreSeeking the Heart of Higher Education
Values such as compassion, social justice, and the search for truth, which animate and give purpose to the lives of students, faculty, and staff, are honored and strengthened by an integrative education. But to be truly integrative, such an education must go beyond a ”values curriculum“ to create a comprehensive learning environment that reflects a holistic vision of humanity, giving attention to every dimension of the human self.
Read MoreThe Future of Higher Education is in our Intention and Actions Today
As we think about the future of education, we must focus on questions of “why” rather than simply “how.”
Read MoreImprovisation, Meditation, and Integral Theory: New Horizons in Contemplative Education
This webinar presents core ideas from Prof. Sarath’s new book, Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness: Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society (SUNY/Albany, 2013).
Read MorePractice: The Core of Contemplative Education
Mirabai Bush introduces a range of practices that have been integrated into courses across the curriculum and addresses the relationship between personal experience with contemplative, introspective practice and bringing a contemplative approach to one’s professional role.
Read MoreThe Central Role of Student Services
IUP’s new Mindfulness Living Community shows how broad student services can connect curricular and extracurricular activities, creating a richer and more engaging educational environment.
Read MoreThe Blue Pearl: A Research Report on Teaching Mindfulness Practices to College Students
This webinar describes the results of Prof. Deborah J. Haynes’s research with undergraduate students on the efficacy of and their experiences with contemplative pedagogy. Her presentation focuses on conceptual issues raised by her formal human-subject research with students over three years–research that included qualitative feedback from them through narrative exercises and journals, a series of quantitative questionnaires about their experiences, and their own works of art.
Read MoreThe Mission of Education: Why We Subsidize Post-Secondary Education
To the extent that we, in higher education, have forgotten our primary mission–challenging our students to inquire as to what it means to be a good citizen of this world–we risk collapsing into a fee-for-service industry in which we simply convey information and train narrowly for the workforce.
Read MoreListening to Our Eyes: Seeing as Meditation
This webinar, presented by Bradford C. Grant, Professor and Director of the School of Architecture and Design at Howard University, is an exploration of meditative exercises using seeing and drawing and the use of physical and visual environments as a means for understanding and contemplation.
Read MoreCourses as Commodities: The Harvard Cheating Scandal
In a final exam last May, nearly half of the 279 students in a Harvard government class were suspected of cheating. This is not just a “Harvard” problem; rather, this is emblematic of a crisis throughout post-secondary education. Many have lost sight of our fundamental mission to create environments for students to discover what is most meaningful to them and to provide the information and tools for them to live out their vision.
Read MoreTrue to Vision: A Response to Daniel Callahan’s “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic”
In “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic,” Daniel Callahan calls for an “edgier” strategy to reduce obesity levels in the United States. I felt compelled to respond to Callahan’s article because the policies he is advocating are not in line with what I believe is his vision for a healthier and happier population.
In order to guide any action, we first need a clear vision: a place to start from that answers questions such as, “What are we doing this for?” and “What is really guiding us?” Because any action that runs counter to this deeply-held vision will cause suffering to ourselves and others, even if it appears to lead to our desired outcome.
Read MoreWanting: Teaching Economics as Contemplative Inquiry
A webinar with Daniel Barbezat, Professor of Economics, Amherst College. Prof. Barbezat discusses contemplative pedagogy and the use of introspective exercises in his course, “Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness.” First-person exercises on this subject are especially poignant for students, as they can directly discover the impact of their own wanting and how it affects their own economic decisions and the markets around them.
Read MoreMirabai Bush: Creating Contemplative Organizations
Mirabai Bush, the Center’s founding director and senior fellow, has been featured in the New York Times for her work in bringing contemplative practices and perspectives into corporate and organizational settings.
Read MoreNew Video About the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Watch a brief video which introduces the Center’s work.
Read MoreFor Further Listening…
Watch webinars and listen to a podcast with Executive Director Daniel Barbezat and Associate Director Mirabai Bush.
Read MoreContemplative Pedagogy: The Special Role of Teaching and Learning Centers
A chapter by Executive Director Daniel Barbezat and Allison Pingree (Harvard University) providing an overview of the definition, intention, and benefits of contemplative exercises, and approaches to fostering these practices through university teaching and learning centers.
Read MoreContemplating Race, Law, and Justice: Some Notes on Pedagogy for Changing the World
Watch Rhonda V. Magee’s keynote address at the 2012 Conference of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.
Read MoreWe’ve Moved! Welcome to our new home
In the days following our 2012 ACMHE Conference we packed up our little one-room office and moved about a mile north to 98 King Street, Northampton.
Read MoreAnnouncing Contemplative Mind-1440 Foundation Grants to Teaching & Learning Centers
We are pleased to announce that, with support from the 1440 Foundation, we have established a new program of grants to foster and support the use of contemplative practices throughout the curriculum through Teaching and Learning Centers.
Read MoreThe Mindful Teacher
A webinar with Steven Emmanuel, Professor of Philosophy, Virginia Wesleyan College.
In discussions about contemplative pedagogy a great deal of attention has been devoted to practical applications of mindfulness in the classroom (what we might call “mindfulness-based pedagogy”). The tendency in this approach is to view mindfulness as a type of technology that can be used to enhance the quality and effectiveness of the teaching and learning experience.
While there are many wonderful benefits of this approach, it generally abstracts mindfulness from its historical roots as a practice aimed at moral and spiritual development. The purpose of this presentation is to recover the value of traditional meditation practice as a means of cultivating the capacities or virtues characteristic of the mindful teacher.
Read More2012 Retreat for Educators
The 2012 retreat is an opportunity to cultivate our awareness and inquire deeply into our professional lives, enabling us to re-engage with our work in higher education from a place of greater skillfulness, depth and insight.
Read MoreThe 2012 ACMHE Conference
Everyone sits in a different place, yet we are all inextricably connected. Bringing the benefits of contemplative education to greater numbers of students asks us to honor wider and more diverse cultural contexts.
Read MoreLegal Education as Contemplative, Multicultural Inquiry
A webinar with Rhonda Magee, Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco.
This webinar examined how we can better develop the cognitive, personal and interpersonal skills necessary to identify and effectively dismantle structures of privilege and subordination in our midst. How can we better learn, work and thrive together in diverse communities as we seek to create a more just world?
Read MoreThe 8th Summer Session on Contemplative Pedagogy
The Summer Session prepares participants to return to their institutions with a deeper understanding of the practice of contemplative pedagogy and methods adapted for classroom and co-curricular use.
Read MoreContemplative Environmental Studies: Pedagogy for Self and Planet
This Summer Institute aims to develop tools for teaching and researching environmental dilemmas with this broader sensibility in mind.
Read MoreJust Published: “Mindfulness in Higher Education”
by Mirabai Bush, Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, 2011, issue 1, pp 183-197 This paper explores the introduction of mindfulness into courses in higher education.Some of these courses are taught by Buddhist scholars; others are taught by scholars within other disciplines who themselves have a meditation practice.Those scholars included here represent a much larger number in diverse settings, including state universities, liberal arts colleges, Ivy League institutions, and historically black colleges.They teach in almost every discipline, including architecture, poetry, chemistry, economics, and...
Read MoreFeatured Resource:
Using Contemplative Practices to Promote Well-Being and Social Justice Awareness
A webinar with Michelle Chatman, Assistant Professor, Department of Justice Studies, University of the District of Columbia
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How Can We Be Daringly and Radically-Well During Times of Upheaval?
Ife Lenard and Ericka Echavarria will discuss specific approaches coupled with contemplative practic...
Indigenous Contemplative Science: An Ethics of Belonging and Reconnection
Yuria Celidwen offers a dynamic presentation that brings together Indigenous science and contemplati...
Digital Proverbs for Responsible Citizens (Lockdown Edition)
Kevin Healy discusses “Ethics and Religion in the Age of Social Media: Digital Proverbs for Responsi...