As higher education strives to keep pace with today’s rapidly expanding knowledge base, an unprecedented need for new learning and research models arises. Students and faculty need to assimilate and synthesize important principles from diverse fields, they need to be able to adapt to change, and they need to be aware of the social and environmental ramifications of their work. In the arts, an increasingly multi-ethnic and stylistically-eclectic creative landscape requires conceptions which cut across previously sharp boundaries between processes and genres. In the sciences, the capacity to probe and manipulate the basic building blocks of life forms not only yields intriguing prospects for enhancing the quality of life, but also raises fundamental environmental and philosophical questions whose resolution may be essential to the future of society.
Two domains of inquiry which are central to addressing these issues are creativity and consciousness. Creativity pertains to the ability to adapt, assimilate, integrate, and invent; in essence, to function effectively and contribute productively in our rapidly-changing world. Consciousness has to do with the nature of the mind, and particularly its capacity to experience various states of awareness. The fact that peak creative experiences often involve glimpses of transcendent states of consciousness points to a close linkage between the two domains, and suggests a complementarity between their respective types of inquiry. That meditative practices, which are a primary modality for investigating consciousness, might enliven an inner calm and heightened clarity which enhances the inventive, problem-solving activities characteristic of creative activity poses significant ramifications for education and research.
- Ed Sarath
Presented by the the University of Michigan Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, the UM School of Music, and the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
For questions about the Conference or the University of Michigan Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies, contact Ed Sarath at (734) 995-0239.
Agenda
8:30 – 9:00 Registration
9:00 – 9:30 Welcome
Ed Sarath and Mirabai Bush
9:30 – 10:45 Contemplative Inquiry
The Contribution of Contemplative Mind to Integrative Education
Introduction by Mirabai Bush
Presentation by Arthur Zajonc
10:45 – 11:00 Break (coffee, tea, and cookies provided)
11:00 - Noon Roundtable discussion
Contemplative Practice and Pedagogy
Patricia Wallace
Jack Miller
Martha Travers
Moderated by Ed Sarath
Noon – 1:30 Lunch
Particpants provide their own meal. Food available on campus.
1:30 – 2:30 Workshops
Curriculum development and the uses of contemplative practice in the classroom
2:30 – 2:45 Break
3:00 – 4:00 Presentation
Bridging Mind and Heart: Towards a Pedagogy of Creativity and Consciousness
Introduction by Ed Sarath
Presentation by Diana Denton
4:00 – 4:15 Closing
4:15 – 7:30 Dinner Break
7:30 – 9:00 Performance
University of Michigan Creative Arts Orchestra (contemporary improvising ensemble)
Ed Sarath, Director
Participant Bios
Mirabai Bush was a founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization. At Seva, she directed the Seva Guatemala Project, which supports sustainable agriculture and integrated community development. She also 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, published by Random House. Mirabai has organized, facilitated, and taught workshops, weekends, and courses on spirit and action for more than 20 years at institutions including Omega Institute, Naropa Institute, Findhorne, Zen Mountain Monastery, University of Massachusetts, San Francisco Zen Center, Buddhist Study Center at Barre, MA, Insight Meditation Society, and the Lama Foundation.
Her spiritual studies include meditation study at the Burmese Vihara in Bodh Gaya, India, with Shri S.N. Goenka and Anagarika Munindra; bhakti yoga with Hindu teacher Neemkaroli Baba; and studies with Tibetan lamas Kalu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Kyabje Gehlek Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and others. She also did five years of intensive practice in Iyengar yoga and five years of Aikido with Kanai Sensei. Her earlier religious study included 20 years of Catholic schooling, ending with Georgetown University graduate study in medieval literature. She holds an ABD in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Diana Denton blends spirituality and the arts in her work as professor, poet and consultant. As Associate Chair in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication at the University of Waterloo, she teaches courses on spirituality, performative inquiry, leadership, and conflict management. Since 1980 Diana has maintained a private consulting practice specializing in training, coaching and consulting in the areas of interpersonal and team communication, leadership development, and spirituality and the arts in education. She has facilitated numerous workshops for private, corporate and educational groups that support an intuitive exploration of the self through meditation and imagination. Her publications include poetry, journal articles, and a book examining knowledge of poetics and the body in explorations of the self and spirit - In the Tenderness of Stone: Liberating Consciousness Through Awakening the Heart (Sterling House, 1998). She is a co-editor of three other books: Spirituality, Action & Pedagogy: Teaching From the Heart (Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), Holistic Learning and Spirituality in Education: Breaking New Ground (SUNY Press, 2005), and Spirituality, Ethnography, & Teaching: Stories From Within (Peter Lang Publishing, in press). Diana is Chair of the Board of the Forge Institute and Director of the Forge Program on Trans-traditional Spirituality in Higher Education. She and her colleagues at the Forge have developed a college course entitled “Spiritual Development in a Diverse World: Communicating Across Differences.” This course is currently being offered at several colleges and universities in Canada and the US. Diana has facilitated numerous 5-day trainings for educators, administrators, and chaplains interested in teaching this course and/or integrating spirituality into their curriculum.
Dr. Robert K.C. Forman Ph.D. founded and is the president of the Forge Institute, a nonprofit learning community dedicated to fostering a renaissance of what he calls trans-traditional spiritual wisdom -- wisdom that goes beyond the limits of a particular religious tradition. His work at the Forge was in part a result of research that he and his team conducted on a striking shift in the nature of spirituality in the United States and elsewhere. His critically acclaimed book documenting the results of his research, GrassrootsSpirituality: What It Is, Why It Is Here, Where It Is Going, won the Bross Prize for studies in Religion. Dr. Forman will speak about the possibilities for this fundamentally new form of spirituality -- focused on the personal, experiential and transcendental - and how we might bring its values into the educational and policital worlds.
To run the Forge Institute, Dr. Forman retired from his tenured position as Associate Professor of Religion at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He also taught at Vassar College, Union Theological Seminary and the New School for Social Research.
Dr. Forman is also a co-founder and Executive Editor of The Journal of Consciousness Studies: Controversies in Science and the Humanities, which has become the central venue for the study of consciousness and its relation to an array of disciplines. Dr. Forman also founded and chaired for seven years the American Academy of Religion's Mysticism Group and Mysticism Consultation. He is the author of nine books on spirituality, mysticism, consciousness and world religions, and is writing three more. Dr. Forman received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
John (Jack) Miller has been working in the field of holistic education for over 30 years. He is author/editor of more than a dozen books on holistic learning and contemplative practices in education which include The Contemplative Practitioner, The Holistic Curriculum and Educating for Wisdom and Compassion. His writing has been translated into seven languages. Jack has worked extensively with holistic educators in Japan and Korea for the past decade and has been visiting professor at two universities in Japan.
He teaches courses on holistic education and spirituality in education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto where he is Professor and Head of the Centre for Teacher Development.
Ed Sarath is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Studies at The University of Michigan.
Recent educational initiatives he has spearheaded include the BFA in Jazz and Contemplative Studies curriculum at The University of Michigan, a degree program which includes meditation and related studies in addition to jazz training; and the Faculty Network for Creativity and Consciousness Studies, which brings faculty together from all fields to probe the transpersonal core of the creative process. He is the founder of STATE: Students, Teachers, and Administrators for Transpersonal Education; and ISIM: The International Society for Improvised Music. He is a member of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute (Integral Art group), and Robert Forman's Forge Institute.
Ed Sarath has presented at Harvard Business School, Brown University, The University of Michigan Business School and elsewhere his ideas on creativity and consciousness. His formats involve hands-on practices involving (rhythm, meditation and improvisational games) and theoretical models of the creative process that are applicable to all fields. He is a 1997 recipient of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Award.
Bio for Martha Winona Travers, Ph.D.
Martha Winona Travers, Ph.D. is a facilitator and educator who helps individuals and groups access their inner dream and manifest it in the outer world. She teaches both shamanic and contemplative practice. She is a poet and essayist and is the creator of The Writer & Contemplative Practice Retreat and Workshop Series offered at various locations throughout the year. She teaches in the Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a personal growth and community-building consultant for hospitals, colleges, and industry. In 2004, she completed a 5-year apprenticeship to an indigenous shaman from the Andes Mountains. She travels and lives in Ecuador part of the year and takes small groups to the Andes Mountains to experience transformative practice. She is the creator of The WayCard Oracle, a divination process, and gives personal readings and consultations on spiritual growth via telephone and in person.
Patricia Wallace is a Professor of English at Vassar College. She is the co-editor of the "Literature Since 1945--" section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and her poems and essays have appeared in such publications as The Columbia History of American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review and PEN America. For 3 years she served as part of a Rockefeller Foundation working group on the role of the arts and humanities in a democratic society. Last spring she received an ACLS grant for curricular development grant from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and will be running an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on "Creativity and Contemplation" in Spring 2007.
Arthur Zajonc is professor of physics at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1978. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan. He has been visiting professor and research scientist at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, and was Fulbright professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. His research has included studies in parity violation in atoms, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between sciences, the humanities and spirituality. He is author of the book Catching the Light, co-author of The Quantum Challenge, and co-editor of Goethe's Way of Science. In 1997 he served as scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogue with H.H. the Dalai Lama published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama (Oxford 2004). He again organized the 2002 dialogue with the Dalai Lama,“The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life,” and acted as moderator at MIT for the “Investigating the Mind” dialogue in 2003.
The University of Michigan Creative Arts Orchestra is one of few ensembles of its kind in the world of contemporary music. A large improvising ensemble, the group was founded in 1992 by Professor Ed Sarath to reflect the eclectic and global trends that increasingly characterize our musical landscape. The group's membership ranges from 15-30, and has included musicians of all instrumental categories, dancers, actors, and poets. While part of the ensemble's programming includes compositions of students and faculty, the group most commonly performs entirely improvised concerts, with no parameters set forth in advance. While this approach poses extraordinary challenges to groups of the CAO's size, it also opens up extraordinary possibilities for a magical coherence to take hold between musicians and listeners. In peak moments the music seems to be guided by a transcendent force that unites all involved into a sublime wholeness. The group's rehearsals involve a system of exercises that cultivate heightened awareness and inventive, interactive, listening skills that are essential to this kind of music making.
The Creative Arts Orchestra's CD, Strata, has been received favorably, Cadence magazine calling the disc an example of "what spontaneity brings forth when highly skilled students are left to their own devices. These students have learned a feel for interaction which other programs only touch upon. Projects like this keep jazz education from belonging to the strictly conservative camp". Fred Sturm of the Eastman School of Music described the Creative Arts Orchestra as "a fresh and vital alternative (within) a national jazz education universe that is still dominated by the traditional big band. Within a single performance, Ed Sarath and his charges draw upon their collective artistic influences to create music with multiple histories. One can only imagine the possibilities that will come forth from this unique ensemble."
The Creative Arts Orchestra has performed at New York's Knitting Factory, with Gregg Bendian as featured soloist; the Detroit-Montreux Jazz Festival, the International Association of Jazz Educators Chicago conference, the Eastman School of Music, Cornell University and Humber College. Its winter 2005 tour included performances at Duquesne University and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the Contemplative Studies Conference at Columbia University, and the Bowery Poetry Club, with guest artist Oliver Lake, in New York City.
Travel Information
Q: Where's MacIntosh Theatre?
A: In the University of Michigan's North Campus, part of the School of Music.Click to view a map of the North campus.
When you find yourself close to North Campus, here's a helpful map for the last stretch.
Q: Where can I find lodging during the conference?
A: Hampton Inn North (Phone: 734-996-4444)Q: How can I get to UMICH's North Campus?
A: A variety of ways...
1. Traveling by AIR
Detroit Metropolitan International Airport is only 20 miles from Ann Arbor, about a 45 minute drive (at the most). Remember though, the airlines suggest arriving at least 2 hours before your flight! Major hubs are: Northwest, Delta, and US Air among others (for more information, call 734/AIR-PORT).
The cheapest way to travel back and forth from the airport is to use MSA's airBus service. They pick up in 3 locations around campus and you can pay by cash, check, or charge it to your student account. Tickets are sold at MUTO, the Michigan Union Ticket Office. A reserved seat is $8 one-way or $13 round-trip. Non-reserved seats are sold on a first come, first serve basis and cost $10 each way. Note that this shuttle only runs prior to scheduled UM school breaks.
For shuttle options, the Ann Arbor Convention Visitor's Bureau maintains a listing.
2. Traveling by Bus
Greyhound
116 West Huron
Phone: 734 662-5511 or 800 231-2222
Office Hours of Operation: Monday-Saturday 8:00am to 6:30pm
For those of you who prefer traveling on the road instead of flying, there are a couple of options for ground transportation into and out of the Ann Arbor Area. One option is the Greyhound bus service. This station offers travel service to different cities around the country; for schedules and information, call the 800 number listed above. The Ann Arbor terminal is one block east of Main Street, approximately one mile from Central Campus and three miles from North Campus. A taxi ride from the terminal to any destination in Ann Arbor would cost at the most $10.00 (including tip).
To Pierpont Commons (north campus center)
From Greyhound
Exit the bus terminal. Go west (left out of the terminal) on Huron Street. Take a left on Main Street. Go about 4 blocks. Take a right on Depot Street. Depot Street turns into Fuller Road after you go under the bridge. Continue straight. At the stoplight, turn left (you will still be on Fuller Road). At the third stoplight, take a left on Bonisteel Boulevard. Go to the stop sign. Take a left on Murfin Road. The Pierpont Commons (and visitor parking) is on your right.
3. Traveling by Train
Amtrak is a national train operation with many stops, also in Canada. Many students, faculty and staff will take the train to Chicago rather than drive. The train station is on Depot Street (see directions below) about a mile away from the Michigan Union on Central Campus and about 2 miles from North Campus. Trains operate 24 hours a day and many cabs wait for passengers in case a ride is needed. Amtrak recommends that you call their toll free number (800 872-7245) for route and price information.
To Pierpont Commons (north campus center)
From Amtrak Station
When you exit the Amtrak Station, you are on Depot Street. Turn left on Depot (it will turn into Fuller Road) and go until the street ends at the stop light. Take a left at the stop light (you will still be on Fuller Road). At the third stoplight, take a left on Bonisteel Boulevard. Go to the stop sign. Take a left on Murfin Road. The Pierpont Commons (and visitor parking) is on your right.
4. Traveling by Car
I-94 (Ford Freeway)
From Detroit (heading West)
Take I-94 West to US-23 North (Exit 180). From US-23, take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). At the end of the exit, take a left (west) onto Plymouth Rd. Go approximately two miles and take a left onto Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
From Chicago (heading East)
(Easiest way for directions, but also longest) Take I-94 East to US-23 North (Exit 180). From US-23, take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). At the end of the exit, take a left (west) onto Plymouth Rd. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
or
Take I-94 East to M-14 East (towards Plymouth) to US-23 South (follow the signs carefully). From US-23, take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). At the end of the exit take a right (west) onto Plymouth Rd. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
I-75/US-23
From Ohio (heading North)
Take US-23 North to Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). Turn left (west) off the exit onto Plymouth Rd. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
From Northern MI (heading South)
Take I-75 to US-23 South (follow the signs carefully). From US-23, take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). Turn right (west) off the exit onto Plymouth. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
I-696 (W.P. Ruether Freeway)
From Northwest Suburbs
Take I-696 West to I-275 South to M-14 West to US-23 South. Take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). Turn right (west) off the exit onto Plymouth Road. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
I-96 (also called the Jeffries Freeway)
From Parts of Detroit, Redford, M-14, Plymouth and Canton
Take I-96 to M-14 West to US-23 South. Take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). Turn right (west) off the exit onto Plymouth Road. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).
From Lansing
Take I-96 East to US-23 South (follow the signs carefully). From US-23, take Exit 41 (Plymouth Road). Take a right (west) off the exit onto Plymouth. Go approximately two miles and take a left on Murfin Road (there's a BP gas station on the right).