Humane Education Commons^™

Seeking Kairos: Creating Oases Of Rest Through Contemplative Practice In The Elementary Classroom, Kaisu Aldom

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Seeking Kairos: Creating Oases of Rest through Contemplative Practice in the Elementary Classroom

This article introduces rest and restfulness as contemplative practice in the context of elementary schooling. As a Canadian elementary teacher, I have been researching ways to introduce contemplative practices of education to support children in their well-being. Children struggle under the pressures of expectations to achieve and excel, to conform and perform, which just as well applies to their teachers. Schooling in a burnout society prioritizes achievement, productivity, and always doing something: “No time to waste” and “keep busy” are mandatory. Not incidentally, the etymological meaning of …

Leading And Learning From Inside Out: Insights From Meditative Inquiry, Jody L. Rebek

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This article explores our modern world and our role in shaping collective experiences. By our thoughts, choices and behaviours (our character), we influence our shared reality. Higher education has an imperative responsibility to engage students ethically and develop their character. I offer a teaching metaphor and case study to meaningfully develop students’ self-awareness of character via an undergraduate leadership course. I employed the ‘seed’ metaphor to illustrate how nurturing students’ self-awareness and agency mirrors the growth of a seed within a carefully cultivated ecosystem. Each contemplative practice (character development) intertwined with leadership content (competence and confidence), serves as essential nourishment, …

Wisdom Responses To Troubled Times: Healing Through Contemplative And Somatic Approaches, David Smith, Thomas Falkenberg, Remy Y.S. Low, David Chang, Åsa Jarskog, Jason Brown, Randy Persad, Anna Rumjahn, Charles Scott, Heesoon Bai

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Humanity is facing troubled times, as witnessed by increased polarization and division that are exploding into various forms of violence. Collectively, we are facing unprecedented ecological and environmental disasters. On campuses throughout North America, and closer to home, student anxiety, depression and other mental health issues are increasingly prevalent. The academic fields of contemplative inquiry and somatic studies, which highlight holistic approaches to education, are responding to these troubled times by showing how we can accomplish presence of mind, promote healing, and embrace the physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of wellness.

Slow Reading Course Evaluations: From Discomfort To Discovery, Brian Baldi, Colleen M. Kuusinen

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) help faculty to get feedback on their teaching, identify areas of strength and growth, and document their teaching effectiveness from the student perspective. While much has been written about whether or not student evaluations are biased (Benton & Cashin, 2012; Kogan, et al., 2010; Shorter, 2023), about the validity of student evaluations in measuring student learning (Uttl et al., 2017), and how to interpret data (Davis, 2009; Hoover-Dempsey n.d.; Lewis, 2001; Linse, 2017; Perlmutter, 2011; Petchers & Chow, 1988; Reibman, 2004), we offer a new, mindful approach to reading student evaluations that might help instructors …

Contemplative Practices Facilitating Awareness, Compassion, And Healing In Study Abroad: A Reflective And Explorative Study, Ciara C. Hoyne, Jing Lin

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This reflective essay focuses on the relationship between contemplative practices and participation in a short-term study abroad trip. The study explores how contemplative practices help facilitate self-understanding, alleviate stress, enhance connection to the host community and culture, and enable healing. We use our experiences participating in a short-term study abroad program as an example for examining the role of contemplative practices in the context of study abroad. We discuss and integrate relevant literature on the topic of meditation, mindfulness, and contemplative inquiry to offer insight into how contemplative practices can be integrated into study abroad in a way that enhances …

Healing In Relation: Honoring Post-Graduate Grief As An Opportunity For Relational Scholarship, Tanya J. Behrisch, Anna Rumjahn, Chris Yakimov

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper is a three-way conversation about grief that follows a graduate program. We explore our experiences with post-graduate grief in community, attending to each other’s sense of loss following separation from supervisors, theses, and graduate programs. In committing to slow scholarship, processes—such as navigating feelings and living—have been valued over producing a manuscript quickly. Slowness, including long gaps between meetings, enabled us to follow the diverse contours of quiet alchemical processes such as grieving, opening up to emptiness, self-acceptance, being enough, and letting go. After years of compression and dialogic friction with her mentor, Tanya confronts feelings akin to …

Imagination: Bridging The Intended, Delivered, And Received Curricula, Vicki Boley Dr., Paul A. Michalec Dr.

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper explores the transformative potential of imagination in higher education, particularly its capacity to bridge the intended, delivered, and received curricula. Through a qualitative study involving in-depth interviews with graduate students, the research highlights how imagination fosters holistic, socially just, and humanizing educational experiences that transcend traditional instructional boundaries, encouraging student ownership and creative engagement in the higher education classroom and beyond.

The Craft Store, David W. Jardine

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This poetic expression focuses on beingness, attention, and our creations and perceptions of beingness and the implications that flow from those perceptions, some of them having to do with how we relate to one another.

Dr. David W. Jardine is a retired University of Calgary Professor who spent years thinking, reading, teaching and writing about the kinships between ecological thinking, pedagogy and hermeneutics. His latest book is "Why Study for A Future We Won't Have?" Commiserations and Encouragement for Ecologically Sorrowful Times, and the forthcoming “[This Ain’t] No Nature Poetry: On Education, Scholarship, and Ecological Mirth.”

Tales Of A Contemplative Academic: Lessons Learned From Integrating Meditation In The College Classroom, Steve Haberlin

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

In this autoethnographical reflective essay, the author recounts his struggles and micro-victories with integrating brief meditation with undergraduates at a private college. The reflection offers three major insights for other faculty considering sharing meditation in higher education.

Labyrinthine Routes To Meditation: Contemplative Pedagogy And Instructor Self-Care, Natalie Mera Ford

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

In the pandemic- and post-pandemic era, new as well as exacerbated work-life stressors have led academia to recognize the vital role wellness plays in teaching and learning. While most institutional and pedagogical response has understandably focused on students’ holistic health, this essay promotes increased instructor self-care as a necessary complement to supporting learners in higher education. By practicing meditative exercises drawn from contemplative pedagogy, faculty and instructional staff can create synergy between mindfulness strategies that we might invite students to try and our own attention to the whole self outside class. As the essay’s case study shows, labyrinth walking in …

The Laughing Buddha: The Education Of Compassionate Leaders Through Improvisational Play, Belinda Chiu

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

With an urgency to build a generative future, educational systems do not have a choice but to pay attention to how and what we train our future leaders. Yet there is still a gap as leadership studies are often relegated as a “soft” skill, rather than integrated as technical knowledge critical to the holistic effectiveness of a tertiary education. As a result, there is often a disconnect between students immersed in the idealistic bubble of the academy and graduates navigating life outside. Inquiry- and reflective-based methods of contemplative practices may be critical for leaders to avoid short-term, short-sighted decisions that …

Exploring The Curriculum Potential Of The Welsh Word Cynefin By Examining Its New Materialist And Contemplative Pedagogical Resonances, Dylan Adams

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Cynefin is a key word in the new curriculum for Wales. Yet it is a word that is difficult to define. It has no direct English translation and originates from Welsh hill farming where it was used by farmers to describe how sheep would form a mysterious attachment to different parts of common land. Subsequently, it has come to be associated with a person’s relationship to a place, where they feel at home. This article examines how the concept of cynefin potentially resonates with posthumanist and contemplative pedagogical perspectives. In doing so, it aims to answer the question, “how could …

Storywood: Collaborating With Opaque Unknowable Others Through Oil Painting, Tanya J. Behrisch

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper demonstrates the use of contemplation and arts-based research (ABR) to explore intersubjectivity between myself and other opaque beings. Through a walking meditation, I experience an affective encounter with a plywood board found lying on a beach. The board radiates agency and mysterious stories about its passage through the world. Drawing on philosopher Tim Lilburn’s concept of permeable attention and Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter, I discover the storied nature of the damaged board and resonances between its stories and my own. By practicing perceptual openness, I discern vitality shimmering beyond the visible surface of the board. During my …

"A Life Altering And Special Journey": The Lasting Impact Of Mindfulness On Semester-Long Study Abroad Participants, Ana Conboy, Kevin Clancy

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Education abroad is held up as a high-impact practice with the potential to engage college and university students in a transformative learning experience (Kuh, 2008). The Institute for International Education (IIE) reports that 347,099 U.S. students received academic credit for study abroad during the 2018-2019 academic school year (IIE). Extensive research into student learning gains abroad have demonstrated that developing student metacognition, or one’s ability to be intentionally self-reflective, is central to transformative learning in the study abroad experience (Vande Berg et al., 2012; Zull, 2012). Consequently, international educators are continually searching for pedagogies (praxis) to facilitate metacognitive learning within …

Emotional Capital And Compassionate Educational Space: Reflection On One Undergraduate Course, Katerina Bodovski

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

In this essay, I reflect upon my experience of creating and teaching a new undergraduate course, Students, Parents, Schools. I look at the course content and process through the lens of emotional capital. While being one of the themes in the course, emotional capital is also developed for the students within the class itself. I identified four aspects of the course that can be linked to building emotional capital: bringing focus to oneself; encouraging students to capitalize on their own experiences; building meaningful connections; and creating a non-punitive environment. I discuss each of the aspects, illustrating them where appropriate …

Health Of Indigenous Orphans And Carers In Perú: A Mixed Methods Case Study Of Hogar De Niñas Virgen De Fatima, Lee Fergusson, Javier Ortiz Cabrejos, Anna Bonshek, Aparna Datey

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a devastating blow to the social fabric of Perú, with the highest orphans per death (OPD) ratio of any country in Latin America. Therefore, 260,000 orphans now require care because of 216,000 parent, custodial grandparent, and caregiver deaths between 2020 and 2022. The purpose of this research is to examine whether the practice of Transcendental Meditation, an established technique for improving the mental and physical health of children, can reasonably be expected to alleviate the symptoms of trauma associated with this surge in orphanhood.

Adolescent indigenous female orphans and their carers at Hogar de Niñas Virgen …

Book Review: Meditation In The College Classroom By Steve Haberlin, Jing Lin

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Book Review: Meditation in the College Classroom by Steve Haberlin

Reviewed by Jing Lin

Educational Evaluation As Hermes, Ying Ma Dr.

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Since the 1980s, educational evaluation has prominently been interwoven with the concepts of measurement and accountability. The reduction of educational evaluation to technical and instrumental processes, ignoring its underlying normative ethical claims and values, is not only undesirable but also detrimental to pursuing educational endeavors. I attempt at a Kuhnian paradigm shift from the measurement and calculation discourse to reframing educational evaluation as Hermes. Educational evaluation as Hermes attends to the messy ground of teaching with ethical dimensions, dwelling in human relationships. I understand educational evaluation as Hermes with three salient dimensions, namely the content of recognizing the divine …

Well-Being In Response To Gratitude Interventions: A Student Elicitation Approach, Erin A. Hopkins

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Various methods exist to invoke gratitude, such as gratitude lists, acts directed towards others, and gratitude contemplation (Rash, Matsuba, and Prkachin, 2011). This study, through student perception elicitation, examines a gratitude list intervention in a professional development undergraduate class which tests the gratitude and enhanced well-being connection theory.

Results suggest various reasons why students perceive a connection between gratitude lists and mental and physical well-being, although there was an overall belief among participants that gratitude lists help more with mental health than physical health. Also, the gratitude and enhanced well-being connection theory was not fully supported as overall respondent sentiment …

Your Story, Your Life, Your Learning: Autobiography Reveals Basis For Supporting Personalized, Holistic Pedagogy, Michael Maser

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Each person ongoingly experiences the world uniquely through vital processes shaping their subjectivity, personhood and sense of self. Learning, an innate characteristic or modality of each human life, of living, likewise arises subjectively or idiosyncratically. In this paper, a phenomenological lens is applied to auto/biographical excerpts concerned with various learning experiences to help reveal essential, subjective characteristics of emergent learning. The insights help establish a basis for challenging the primacy of objectivist learning evaluations. The insights also confirm the importance of personalizing learning as a pedagogical gesture nurturing and enfranchising student learning in significant ways beyond conventional educational approaches …

Re-Thinking Education For Sustainable Development: Key Learning Insights From The Sdsn Usa Transformative Education Summit 2023, Radhika Iyengar, Sumie Song, Deepak Sridhar, Wendy M. Purcell, Ann Nielsen, Iveta Silova, Matthew A. Witenstein, Wen-Wen Tung

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper summarizes key learning insights from the 2023 U.S. Summit on Transformative Education organized by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network USA. Over 400 members from higher education institutions, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, students, and teachers, joined the online event held February 23-25. The Summit created a bridge between social justice issues with an historical lens and sustainable development. Learning insights include those shared by session speakers, dialogue among participants during thematic conversations and regional networking forums, comments made by attendees on session Jamboards and the Zoom Chat function, and post-Summit feedback. A high-level thematic review was undertaken to cluster …

“A Joyous And Frightening Shock”, David W. Jardine

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper uses several photographs to focus on a hermeneutic exploration of several terms that have become used in contemplative or holistic education circles: mystery, elusiveness, miracles, energy, and aliveness. It ends with brief thoughts on the presence of my 22-month-old grandson on various ventures -- gardening, seeing and hearing birds nearby, feeling captivated by the Earth -- that his grandfather knows well.

“A Word For Nature”: A Reflection On A Contemplative Teacher-Training Course In The Desert, Netta Baryosef-Paz, Nirit Assaf

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper reflects on an interdisciplinary, environmental, and contemplative course the authors taught at Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv. Entitled “I am in Nature,” the course was co-taught by an ecologist and a literary scholar. It included a two-day base camping and hiking experience in the Negev Desert and three on-campus meetings. The students read Nature Writing and Ecopoetry, practiced guided mindfulness meditations in the field, and kept contemplative-writing journals. In this community voices piece, we offer an innovative pedagogy for higher education that centers on the integration of the learner’s mind, body, and heart through interdisciplinary, contemplative, …

Knowing The Unknowable: Visions Of Troubled Lands, Estella C. Kuchta

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper describes the author’s clairvoyant visions of war and personal experiences of transrational knowledges. It is an account of one Westerner coming to know outside of and despite Western episteme. Transrational knowing was modelled by companion dogs in the author’s childhood and literary figures in early adulthood, and was experienced as a means of self-protection. Western culture fosters skepticism about transrational knowledges, such as psychic visions and telepathic connections. This paper asserts that transrational knowing—whether between humans, other species, or humans and other species—is a valid and readily available form of knowing that exists outside of and in spite …

Philosophical Counselling Through Meditative Inquiry: Insights For Holistic And Contemplative Educators And Practitioners, Ashwani Kumar

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This paper explores how meditative inquiry can contribute to philosophical counselling, and how these two perspectives together can inform the work of holistic and contemplative educators and practitioners. After outlining the definition, goals, and practices related to meditative inquiry and pointing to its transformative potential, the author draws attention to how meditative inquiry and philosophical counselling share similar goals, such as engagement in authentic inner exploration of questions of deep existential significance, and highlights the benefits of processes related to meditative inquiry, such as developing attentive listening and observation, engaging in creative and aesthetic exploration, and connecting with nature. Rather …

Giving And Taking Care During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Secondary Teachers’ Experiences Of Social Emotional Learning, Janna Jobel, Rebecca J. Lloyd

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) has been primarily researched in elementary schools, and within this context, SEL curriculum is often presented as an isolated, preplanned curriculum, with a list of curricular objectives to be delivered. A phenomenological inquiry was conducted to better understand the ways in which SEL and SEL curriculum are understood and experienced in a high school context. Data gathered from close phenomenological observations and interviews with three high school teachers in mathematics and physical education afforded the opportunity to orient, interpret, and describe the phenomenon of SEL-in-action. Rich descriptions of SEL as it is lived were generated and …

Editorial Introduction: Contemplative And Holistic Education As Inside-Out Work For Healing, Peace, Justice, And Equity, Heesoon Bai, Charles Scott, Cary L. Campbell, Jwalin Patel

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

Inaugural Special Issue: EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Meeting The Jche Team: A Reconstructed Interview, Heesoon Bai, Charles Scott, Cary L. Campbell, Jwalin Patel, Yifan Sun, Jing Lin, Hyeyoung Bang, Sachi Edwards, Deepa Srikantaiah, Yishin Khoo, Denise L. Mchugh

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This “reconstructed interview-conversation” involves the entire editorial team of the Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education (JCHE). Together, the team dialogues around the shared visions, aspirations, motivations, and aims we have in creating this new journal platform. With this sharing, the team sends out a welcoming invitation to colleagues from around the world to get to know our new journal and to join our work to support and promote contemplative and holistic education. We at JCHE are committed to the ideal of education as transformative integration of mind-body-heart-spirit, which we ultimately understand as a decolonizing project. Through this interview, various …

The Four Protocols Of Engagement And How To Apply Them, Joyce A. Schneider

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

In response to concerns as to how to respectfully mobilize Canada's 2015 Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) 94 Calls to Action in our teaching/learning and/or life practices, I developed the Four Protocols of Engagement as a starting point for those ready to authentically engage with First Peoples, their/our lands, and ways of doing, knowing, and valuing. I demonstrate how I apply the Four Protocols in my own work through detailing how each protocol enacted requires preparatory knowledge seeking and actions to make meaningful and impactful Land Acknowledgements. I conclude by reflecting on the content and practices outlined in this example of …

‘How To Be Here?’, Dialoging Into Climate-Change: An Interview With Tim Lilburn, Tim Lilburn, Cary L. Campbell

Journal of Contemplative and Holistic Education

This interview with Canadian, poet, philosopher and essayist Tim Lilburn was commissioned for this Special Issue. Lilburn discusses with Cary Campbell, the general dilemma of ‘how to be here’ – both: how to connect to land and place as a member of settler society, as well as; how to inhabit this moment of acute climate crisis – discussing ideas from Lilburn’s (2017) previous book The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place, and the forthcoming Interiority & Climate-Change. This interview follows up from an earlier dialogue between Lilburn and Campbell, published by Philosophasters.org in 2019, and republished below with permission.