Originally broadcast on Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Prof. Sarath writes:

[Improvisation, Meditation, and Integral Theory: New Horizons in Contemplative Education] will present core ideas from my new book, Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness: Jazz as Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society (SUNY/Albany, 2013). The book is the first to apply to music principles of an emergent, consciousness-based worldview called Integral Theory and poses potentially important ramifications for contemplative education—which I regard as among the most exciting and promising developments in the academic world. Central is the interplay between improvisation and meditation as contrasting yet complementary epistemologies that promote creativity-consciousness development. The jazz tradition boasts a long legacy of innovators who have engaged with contemplative disciplines in order to more fully integrate the heightened episodes of consciousness invoked in their improvisatory excursions into their music and lives. In addition to yielding a rich process template for contemplative development, the jazz-inspired integral framework also offers a sophisticated theoretical framework that may be important to contemplative education’s next evolutionary strides. Among the areas addressed by the integral framework are the value of integration of theory and practice, trans-traditional models of contemplative/consciousness development that recognize powerful connecting threads across lineages while also celebrating differences, and tools that help aspiring contemplatives navigate their way through the often-overwhelming smorgasbord that defines contemporary spiritual life.

About the Presenter:

Ed Sarath is Professor of Music in the Department in Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation, of which he was the founding faculty member and chair (1987-2007), at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance. Active as performer, composer, author, and educational innovator, he is also Director of U-M’s Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, an interdisciplinary network of colleagues interested in the inner workings of creativity and its foundations in consciousness. He founded and serves as President of the International Society for Improvised Music (www.isimprov.org), an organization devoted to promoting awareness of the importance of improvisational studies in musical training and improvised music in today’s diverse world. His most recent book—Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness: Jazz as an Integral Template for Music, Education, and Society (State University of New York/Albany, 2013)—is the first to apply principles of an emergent, consciousness-based worldview called Integral Theory to music. As flugelhornist and composer, he has performed and recorded with top names in the field and across the globe. Among his five CD releases is New Beginnings, featuring the London Jazz Orchestra performing his large-ensemble compositions. He is a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts (three-time NEA fellow, twice in performance, once in composition), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity.

A webinar with Mirabai Bush, Founding Director and Senior Fellow, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
originally broadcast Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Mirabai Bush will introduce a range of practices that have been integrated into courses across the curriculum, including mindfulness, contemplative reading and writing, compassion and loving kindness, yoga and tai chi. Contemplative practices cultivate capacities central to education, including focused attention, deepened understanding of course material, greater kindness and compassion, and enhanced inquiry and insight. This webinar will also address the relationship between personal experience with contemplative, introspective practice and bringing a contemplative approach to one’s professional role.

Examples are drawn from the courses of Contemplative Mind Fellows and members of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

About the Presenter

Mirabai Bush was a co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and served as Executive Director until 2008. Under her direction, The Center developed its programs in education, law, business, and activism and its network of thousands of people integrating contemplative practice and perspective into their lives and work.

Mirabai holds a unique background of organizational management, teaching, and spiritual practice. A founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization, she directed the Seva Guatemala Project, which supports sustainable agriculture and integrated community development. Also at Seva, she co-developed Sustaining Compassion, Sustaining the Earth, a series of retreats and events for grassroots environmental activists on the interconnection of spirit and action. She is co-author, with Ram Dass, of Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service. She is editor of Contemplation Nation: How Ancient Practices Are Changing the Way We Live. She recently recorded the CD Working with Mindfulness.

Mirabai is currently writing a book on contemplative academic methods with Center Director Dan Barbezat, and she teaches in the Smith College School of Social Work Contemplative Clinical Practice Certificate Program.

The fullness of their education is expressed through students’ whole lives, through the ways in which they actually live. If we cannot create greater connections between traditional curricular activities and “extra-curricular” activities, we will have lost a great opportunity to foster communities of well-being and greater connection among our students.

As important as it is to create classroom environments in which students inquire deeply into meaning, connection, and purpose, we must also collectively pay attention to all the time students are not in class. Students are actually in classes only about 15 hours per week–leaving off sleep (if they sleep!), there remains about 100 hours per week. Many of these non-class-time hours are taken up with lab work, reading, and homework, but what of those hours not spent on activities directly related to courses? It is in these times that students interact with one another, establishing, in effect, a rich laboratory which engages their action and learning in their communities.

We must ask, and pay keen attention to, what students are cultivating during this time and how we can support their development. Certainly, for residential colleges and universities, this is a major question and challenge.

An example of an institution innovating in this area is Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). A large state school with over 12,000 undergraduates, many of whom are first-generation college students, IUP has embraced the idea that schools create communities wherein education occurs in all aspects of students’ lives. They have created a system of “Living-Learning Communities” wherein students live in residential halls with a given theme and have faculty and staff mentors who help them with their topics. These communities are designed to extend learning beyond the classroom and model to students that their learning engages all aspects of their lives.

One of the newest communities, The Mindfulness Living Community, is spearheaded by ACMHE member Kim Weiner and will start in fall 2013. It will support contemplative modes of learning and demonstrate how these practices can “deepen students’ capacity for insight and reflection, reduce stress, cultivate compassion and increase learning of disciplines.” So persuasive were the arguments for this initiative that plans have been made to create quiet reflection/meditation rooms in every residential dorm on campus! To support the community, classes will be offered in mindfulness and yoga practice and a meditation room has already been established. Of the 20 advisory mentors for this community, 8 are faculty members (many of whom use contemplative practices in their classes) and 6 are graduate students in clinical psychology; the others come from all aspects of student services, e.g. the Interfaith Council, the Center for Health and Well-Being, etc. It is a wonderful example how we can work together to create integrated learning environments, establishing a rich opportunity for students to grow and learn.

This bold and innovative program is providing a powerful model for both the integration of contemplative practices in education and the recognition that all aspects of our students’ lives contribute to and can deepen their education. Let’s work to create a new integrated culture in which everyone is working together to provide a rich environment for the cultivation of learning, meaning, and purpose.

Daniel Barbezat is Professor of Economics at Amherst College and Executive Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Over the past decade, he has become interested in how self-awareness and introspection can be used in post-secondary education, economic decision-making and creating and sustaining well-being. With the support of a Contemplative Practice Fellowship in 2008, he has developed courses that integrate contemplative exercises designed to enable students to gain deeper understanding and insight. His approach to these economic classes has been featured in the Boston Globe, the U.S. News & World Report, as well as on the NPR program “Here & Now.”

Along with experimental research on choice and awareness, he is currently editing a group of papers on examples of contemplative pedagogy across the disciplines with Arthur Zajonc, co-writing a book with Mirabai Bush on contemplative pedagogy, and writing a book entitled Wanting.

Mirabai Bush, founding Director and Senior Fellow of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, contributed a chapter on mindfulness and higher education to this volume.

A Webinar with Deborah J. Haynes
Professor, Art and Art History, University of Colorado-Boulder
originally broadcast Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Professor Haynes writes, “For several years, I conducted formal research with students in both small and large lecture-format courses. My research will be published in the journal Buddhist-Christian Studies later this year.

“The blue pearl” is how one of my students described the experience of developing mindfulness. She said that the ability “to draw inwards and be peaceful shows as a concentrated blue light in my brain.” In this webinar I describe the results of my research with undergraduate students on the efficacy of and their experiences with contemplative pedagogy. I teach first-year students both techniques of meditation and contemplative approaches to making art. My presentation will focus on conceptual issues raised by my 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.”

About the Presenter

Before coming to the University of Colorado, Deborah was Director of Women’s Studies at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. With an M.F.A. degree from the University of Oregon and Ph.D. from Harvard University, she is both a scholar and visual artist. She has published six books: Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Vocation of the Artist (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Art Lessons: Meditations on the Creative Life (Westview, 2003), Book of This Place: Spirituality, Art, and the Land (Pickwick, 2009), Spirituality and Growth on the Leadership Path: An Abecedary (Pickwick, 2012), and Bakthin Reframed (I.B. Tauris, 2013). She has also edited books and journals, and has published numerous articles and reviews. Her art includes drawing and writing in marble. A new website is under construction at www.deborahjhaynes.com.

Deborah has practiced yoga for more than 30 years, and has experience in Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan Buddhist meditation traditions. After helping to care for several friends who died, during 2007-08 she completed training to serve as a hospice volunteer.

In the United States, markets allocate goods, with consumers and producers determining prices, providing signals for the allocation of resources. And for many, many goods and services, these markets tend to work very well.

However, we recognize that markets are not always able to provide all of the services that benefit our society, and so we also support activities and subsidize programs not in markets but which hold meaning for us. In 2011, Americans gave nearly $300 billion in charitable contributions; 117 million U.S. households, 12 million corporations, 99,000 estates, and 76,000 foundations gave to charities during the year. (Reuters, June 19, 2012) We provide such support because we believe in the missions of these institutions and want to increase the impact of their programs.

In addition to giving directly, we also subsidize a whole host of services and activities provided by the government and financed through our taxes. Usually, these are services that produce benefits to society at large, outside of those who are directly consuming or producing them. Economists call these benefits “positive externalities” and recognize that free markets will likely underprovide these goods without any intervention—subsidizing them increases their use and enhances the welfare of society at large.

As in many nations, primary and secondary education in the United States is subsidized. Making basic education available provides the necessary (but not sufficient!) conditions for a well-informed population so that a representational democracy can operate, and we maintain a society comprised of individuals who have the basic skills required to join the labor force, act responsibly, and have the tools necessary to face the many global challenges faced by humans today.

Post-secondary education is also subsidized. Virtually all private and public institutions, both 2-year and 4-year, subsidize their students’ educations through donations, grants or with public funding. For example, in 2009, Connecticut’s 55,000 community college students paid for 21 percent of the total cost of their education—the highest rate in the last 20 years. (CT Mirror, December 8, 2010) At private liberal arts colleges and large universities, subsidies are provided at just about every level; for example, the Harvard Law School website states that “[e]very student enrolled at Harvard Law School receives an implicit subsidy from the School’s endowment and the annual gifts made to the Law School by generous benefactors, in that the tuition fee covers only about 60% of the total cost of providing a quality legal education to each student.”

Why don’t we expect students to pay the full cost of their education? If the only goal of post-secondary education were to provide accurate information and vocational training, then most students would simply pay the full cost and receive the returns in terms of higher income throughout their careers, just like an investment in a financial market. If all schools are doing is training for the labor market and signaling to future employers, then subsidies do not really make sense. Sure, some subsidies would be available in recognition of profound differences in preparation and access, but we would not have reason to subsidize all students.

Let me be clear before continuing further: an education that provides skills to serve the labor market is vital for individuals, the economy and our society. Providing the means to engage in meaningful work is obviously important.

However, the reason we continue to subsidize post-secondary education is to produce benefits beyond those that simply accrue to the student him or herself through vocational training and employment.

Education must create environments for our students to inquire and challenge themselves about the meaning of their lives and the lives of others; this is the primary mission of education. Our courses must offer challenging reflections on how the material relates to our students’ values, allowing them to discern the nature of the impact they want to have in the world.

We must return to this mission and attend to it throughout our classes, student services, career counseling—all aspects of higher education.

I believe that many in higher education have forgotten about this primary mission, and that this explains why so many in higher education are concerned about its purpose.

Christina Elliott Sorum, writing about this issue from the perspective of liberal arts in 2005, said, “It seems to me that our mission—why we teach what we teach—is muddled, especially with regard to the questions of whether we should or can teach values and of why the liberal arts are relevant beyond the teaching of skills.” From the vantage point of 2013, I agree with her statement: “It is no longer clear to our students—I fear, in part, because it is not clear to us—that the liberal arts prepare us to be better persons and better citizens and leaders in today’s world.” (Christina Elliott Sorum “The Problem of Mission: A Brief Survey of the Changing Mission of the Liberal Arts,” in Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities ACLS, Occasional Paper No. 59, 2005.)

This mission, of challenging our students to inquire as to what it means to be a good citizen of this world, must be supported—and needs to be subsidized, since all beings benefit from it. We subsidize our students’ education since that is how we create and support a vibrant and ethical society.

We have the means to do this: to complement our teaching by integrating students’ sense of engagement and purpose directly into their studies.

The first step in this process is for students to become clear about what is most deeply meaningful to them—what are their values? It is vital that we provide exercises and time for students to reflect on how the material in their courses affects and challenges their own sense of meaning. Along with guidance in this inquiry, students need to be supported in learning to attend to the implications and consequences of their actions; without an understanding of the impact our behavior has on ourselves and on others, we are destined to create harm and suffering. This requires clarity and sustained attention; expedient gains from abandoning meaning seem so alluring, and actions based in violence, lust or greed have such obvious costs. But once this inquiry is established and supported, students can begin to focus on their intention and alter behavior that is not in accord with it.

To support our students in the inquiry as to what means most deeply to them, and to provide them the tools to live out that meaning in the world is the primary mission of education. Analytic thinking, fostered and developed so well by academic institutions, also benefits from the complement of these contemplative approaches—enabling students to relate their learning directly to their own lives and act in ways that they value, deepening their understanding of the material they are studying.

Join us at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society as we address and confront these issues. Learn more at contemplativemind.org.

Daniel Barbezat is Professor of Economics at Amherst College and Executive Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. Over the past decade, he has become interested in how self-awareness and introspection can be used in post-secondary education, economic decision-making and creating and sustaining well-being. With the support of a Contemplative Practice Fellowship in 2008, he has developed courses that integrate contemplative exercises designed to enable students to gain deeper understanding and insight. His approach to these economic classes has been featured in the Boston Globe, the U.S. News & World Report, as well as on the NPR program “Here & Now.”

Along with experimental research on choice and awareness, he is currently editing a group of papers on examples of contemplative pedagogy across the disciplines with Arthur Zajonc, co-writing a book with Mirabai Bush on contemplative pedagogy, and writing a book entitled Wanting.

Bradford C. Grant is a registered architect with extensive experience in urban and community design, universal design, contemplative practices in design education and social, cultural and ethical factors in architecture. His community design work, research on the role of African American architects and his teaching on “Drawing as Meditation” has earned him the Universal Design Education Award, the Virginia Downtown Development Association Award, AIA Education Honor Award, the AIA Institute Honor for Collaborative Achievement and the Contemplative Practice fellowship.

Grant is past president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the Historic Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) liaison to the board of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), member of the Fetzer Institute’s Advisory Council on the Design Professions, board member of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and Chairperson of the Humanities Council of the District of Columbia. He is involved in research and practice of physical accessibility and health disparities in architecture and community design. He has taught in interdisciplinary settings including Ethnic Studies, Landscape Architecture, Engineering and Architecture Departments. He completed his graduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley, CA and undergraduate first professional degree from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.