ACMHE Contemplative Education Webinars

Dr. Leonard Cruz explores storytelling through the creative arts and leads contemplative exercises that can have a positive impact as we navigate through challenges such as COVID-19, racial injustices, and gender and sexuality inequities.

This webinar with Dr. Angel Acosta and Zishan Jiwani explores a study of a community breathwork series that aimed to provide people with a virtual space to heal from and wrestle with racial trauma.

David Forbes will offer critique and discussion of mindfulness practices, particularly in K-12 contexts, that risk adjusting students to social inequities rather than working together to mindfully identify, resist, challenge, and transform them.

This webinar, presented by Anita Chari and Angelica Singh, introduces participants to our approach to using trauma-informed pedagogies, the neuroscience of mental health, and pedagogies of social justice and diversity.

In this webinar, we will take a look at the market forces that incentivize technology to distract and manipulate us. We’ll consider the consequences of chronic distraction in the short and long term, across individuals and society as a whole. And then we’ll look to attention restoration theory (ART) for ideas about what to do ...

Ife Lenard and Ericka Echavarria will discuss specific approaches coupled with contemplative practices that offer a means of building and sustaining adults through relational and societal challenges, such as a global pandemic, isolation, remote learning and the demands of digital etiquette and productivity. 

Kevin Healy discusses “Ethics and Religion in the Age of Social Media: Digital Proverbs for Responsible Citizens” and how he uses it in his classes within the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

As educators, COVID-19 presents a particular challenge: having converted our classrooms to online platforms, we now face the task of teaching in a way that is worthy of this historical moment. What challenges and opportunities does the coronavirus pose? How can we best be of service to our students in this time of profound uncertainty ...

In this webinar, Drs. Chatman and Oliver envision “creating and sustaining contemplative space that centers and flows out of our voices, experiences, and collective wisdom as Black scholar-practitioners. We strongly believe that these spaces are important and affirming for Black people and anyone in the broader community interested in learning about contemplative pedagogy through ...

Dr. Alexia Ferracuti explores the intersections between contemplative practices and intercultural approaches for creating inclusive learning environments, and identify ways in which contemplative practices can serve as means for developing and modeling educators’ self-awareness and capacity for valuing differences among learners and ways of learning.

In this webinar, Dr. Maria Hamilton Abegunde discusses how contemplative practices can assist students, faculty, and staff in doing reflective work that will lead them to mentoring relationships – in all areas of life – that encourage balance, community, appreciation of culture, and academic success.

Angel Acosta discusses how using a 4ft x 20ft timeline as a contemplative learning tool supports participants with deepening their understanding of entrenched racial and socio-economic inequality in the United States.

Fostering contemplative spaces in academic settings is often limited by the fear and resistance educators, students, and administrators face. This webinar will help prepare participants to utilize contemplative practices to work with fear and resistance in themselves, students, management, and systems.

Drs. Mamgain and Majied discuss fierce self-compassion as it relates to interdependence so that participants learn how to increase their own positive life force through progressive self-reflection.

Building upon the June 2019 webinar introducing soulfulness, this webinar focuses on the application of soulfulness to contemplative practice. Presenter Shelly P. Harrell, Ph.D. is a psychologist whose work focuses on individual, relational, and collective well-being in the context of culture and oppression.

This webinar will introduce “soulfulness” as an approach to contemplative practice that centers a synergistic integration of the psychological, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of soul.

Participants in this webinar will engage foundational information about Islam, Islamophobia, and the historical context about Islam as relevant to current-day realities, and will consider connections between Islam and contemplative practices, and opportunities to create space for Muslims in contemplative education.

In this webinar with Juliet Trail, Director of Education for the University of Virginia Contemplative Sciences Center, we will walk through ways in which we can cultivate contemplative approaches across the various mission areas of higher education – including academics, the co-curricular domain (including student life, student health, and faculty/staff life), research, service, and patient ...

In this webinar with Maia Duerr, research director of CMind’s Contemplative Net Project (2002-2004), you’ll learn about the inspiration and story behind the Tree of Practices concept: the image was originally created as a way to organize and represent the project’s findings.

A webinar with Éliane Ubalijoro, PhD, exploring how we can navigate challenges we face today and others we have yet to anticipate, especially in higher education.

In this webinar with organizer and activist Holly Roach Knight, we will look at some of the obstacles to social change and explore how a contemplative view, practice, and conduct can help us address them. In essence, we will look at how contemplative education in higher education can help equip students to navigate and ...

In this webinar, Dr. Maria Hamilton Abegunde draws on the work done in her graduate level Black Feminisms class to ask, “What if we intentionally structure our teaching with rituals of wholeness, healing, and joy; practices that help students feel connected to the powerful things that can nurture and sustain them?”

This webinar offers an introduction to Dr. Kerr Mesner’s work developing contemplative and anti-oppressive approaches to addressing issues of gender/sexual diversity in the classroom. Participants will have an opportunity to engage with this work experientially, as well as to reflect on their own teaching practices in addressing gender/ sexual diversity in their own classrooms.

This webinar with Dr. Patricia Owen-Smith focuses on the place of contemplative knowing and contemplative practices within the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) framework. 

Educator and trauma professional David Treleaven draws on a decade of research and clinical experience to discuss safe, transformative ways of teaching and practicing mindfulness with an awareness of trauma.

As she prepares to retire, Renée A. Hill writes, “This webinar is about what I have learned in the classroom over the last fifteen years about contemplative practices and what they can bring to learning and growth—both that of my students and my own.”

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, will discuss community building and designing healing spaces through diverse sources of knowledge, storytelling, embodied practice, and creative expression.

This webinar, presented by Stephanie Briggs (Assistant Professor of English, Community College of Baltimore County), focuses on ways to develop and maintain a campus-wide contemplative community. We will investigate how to recruit faculty and staff members, the design of a program, goals and objectives of the community, individual/shared facilitation, and cost.

Dr. Kamilah Majied will lead participants through activities that enable them to infuse a liberatory consciousness into their teaching and their contemplative practice.

More than a concept, cultural humility is a process of personal and communal reflection to analyze the root causes of suffering and create a broader, more inclusive view of the world. To practice cultural humility is to maintain a willingness to suspend what we know, or what we think we know, about a person ...

In this webinar, Pearl Ratunil and Jon Brammer explore what a contemplative “initiative” can be at a two-year college where resources are scarce, the audience for contemplative pedagogy is sparse, and the need for contemplative approaches is great.

In this webinar, Dr. Levy will present some of the contemplative exercises and methods used in his courses and seminars. He will also discuss the philosophy underlying them, which places the emphasis on student discoveries through mindful observation and reflection, rather than on general rules that everyone should, or must, obey.

Prof. Alberto López Pulido presents a webinar underscoring the importance of contemplative practices for students of color at a private Roman Catholic University in San Diego, California. Through this work, a new Pedagogic Imaginary is put forth that embraces cultural diversity and social justice for all students, but in particular, students of color and first-generation ...

This webinar with Dr. Aaron Godlaski asks, How best do we connect the pedagogy of contemplative practices with the scholarship of contemplative studies? Should we treat research and practice as dichotomy, or dialectic?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. David Lee Keiser and Julie Dalley present their work on developing and implementing a new contemplative pedagogy faculty fellowship at Montclair State University.

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).

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.

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A webinar with Dr. Catherine Kerr, Department of Family Medicine at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine and Brown Contemplative Studies Initiative, Brown University. Somatic Attention can be a foundational practice for educators. Empathy, “gut sense,” and improved attention skills are all enhanced by somatic attention practice, especially the somatic attentional components of mindfulness meditation. ...

Presented by Laura Rendon, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, and Vijay Kanagala, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Texas-San Antonio. Sentipensante pedagogy offers a transformative vision of education that emphasizes the harmonic, complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition  and the pensar of intellect and scholarship; between teaching and learning; between formal knowledge and wisdom; and between Western and non-Western ...

Jill Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science, Vassar College, gives examples of different types of contemplative practices that she has used in a variety of geoscience courses. Earth science content that has proven suitable for illumination with contemplative techniques includes geologic time, chemical and physical weathering, and characteristics for distinguishing different mineral groups.

A webinar with Jeremy Hunter, Assistant Professor, The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. Peter Drucker, the founder of the discipline of modern management, asserted that making knowledge workers productive was the key to economic survival for the developed economies. Though knowledge workers use their minds to make a living, are they ...

A webinar with David M. Zlotnick, Professor of Law, Roger Williams University School of Law. Sponsored by a fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, Professor Zlotnick created a course that explored the potential for mindfulness theory and practice to help aspiring lawyers make a career in trial work more humane and sustainable. ...

A webinar with Linda-Susan Beard,Associate Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College Lectio divina is an ancient Christian monastic practice associated with more than 1500 years of Benedictine prayer and preparation for prayer. It moves “reading” beyond the search for knowledge to an attentive and interactive appreciation for what rests beneath the text and in our own ...

A webinar with John Makransky, Associate Professor of Buddhism and Comparative Theology, Boston College Wednesday, February 23, 2011 For more information: see FoundationForActiveCompassion.org, with links for Social Service, Social Justice, Dharma Teaching, etc. For workshops, retreats and meditation groups: go to FoundationForActiveCompassion.org, see links for Calendar and Meditation Groups. For a directory of socially engaged Buddhist organizations: Google “Socially ...

A webinar with Peter Schneider, Professor of Architecture and Chancellor’s Scholar, College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado Denver Wednesday, December 1, 2010 This webinar explores the effects of Vitruvius’ 1st century BCE descriptions of meditatio and contemplatio as they ripple through the history of architecture’s practices. Vitruvius’ words establish meditatio–from the Greek medesthai–as the essential ...

A webinar with David Haskell, Professor of Biology, University of the South, Sewanee, TN Wednesday, October 27, 2010 This webinar explores the use of contemplative practices in two different classroom contexts: hunger awareness and acoustic openness. Contemplation can provide students with the interior resources to hear both the pain of the world and the world’s beauty. These ...

A webinar with Richard J. Davidson, Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 This webinar provided an introduction to the emerging field of contemplative neuroscience.  This emerging field is harnessing the concepts and methods from the modern study of neuroplasticity and applying them to the alterations that might be produced ...

A webinar with David M. Levy, Professor, The Information School, University of Washington Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 David Levy writes, “Ten years ago I moved from a well-known high tech think tank to my first academic job, discovering along the way that the extreme busyness, overload, fragmentation, and acceleration of contemporary culture are just as prevalent within ...

A webinar with Anne Beffel, Associate Professor of Art, Syracuse University Wednesday, April 28, 2010 Anne Beffel is a practicing “public artist” and professor of art at Syracuse University. She creates opportunities for empathetic exchanges through art. As a 2008 Contemplative Practice Fellow she created the course Contemplative Arts and Society to explore the intersection of art, ...