Education Commons^™

Deconstructing Cultural And Social Norms In The Classroom, Kimberly Davis, Ann Brunjes, Sabrina Gentlewarrior, Margaret Lowe

Margaret Lowe

BSC’s strategic priorities emphasize our commitment to “achieving a heightened appreciation of social responsibility.” One way we can do this in the classroom is to raise, investigate, and potentially deconstruct unexamined and often limiting social and cultural norms. In this roundtable, presenters will share specific classroom and scholarly practices that encourage students to grapple with these complex issues. Informed by multidisciplinary perspectives, the presenters will discuss strategies for using films about racial conflict to critique white ways of seeing; strategies for teaching the idea that race, including “whiteness,” is a historically specific social construction; the use of literary texts to …

Contemplative Practices In The Classroom: A Cross-Discipline Discussion, Mark Brenner, Margaret Lowe, Michelle Mamberg, David O'Malley

Margaret Lowe

Introducing contemplative practices, such as meditation, reflective listening, or directed silence, into the classroom can provide students with methods for the development of awareness, attentiveness and mindfulness. Higher education is traditionally grounded in a detached approach to learning, done in the service of fostering critical thinking. While objective analysis is a vital skill, such an approach may leave out the students’ lived experience. Incorporating contemplative practices fosters a student’s development of self- knowledge, compassion and the ability to embody theory in practice.

This roundtable discussion will provide attendees with an introduction to contemplative practices and their use in higher education; …

Plenary 4: Engaged Student Learning Across Disciplines: Reflection Within And Beyond The Classroom, Michelle Mamberg, Margaret Lowe, David O'Malley, Laura Mcalinden

Margaret Lowe

Contemplative pedagogy introduces a range of methods into our courses which aim to explore various mindfulness-based practices which have been shown to improve engaged student learning. By incorporating reflection on one's own immediate experience, faculty and students can better explore such analytic categories as objectivity, bias, point-of-view, acquired knowledge, and argumentation. In addition, supporting BSU's social justice initiative, recent research has demonstrated that training in reflective practices fosters development of self-knowledge, compassion (for oneself, others and the planet), and community-building. Based on the enthusiastic response to our 2010 roundtable, we plan to provide attendees further examples of such pedagogical techniques. …