Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning

258 Pages·2013·2.189 MB·English

by  Daniel P. Barbezat, Mirabai Bush

MORE PRAISE FOR CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICES IN
HIGHER EDUCATION
“This book is a hugely inspiring and practical resource for educators, giving
them a whole other dimension of experience from which to bring to life the
beauty of their subject and engage their students in discovering that beauty for
themselves. Contemplative practices, integrated into the curriculum of higher
education in the ways the authors describe and advocate so skillfully and
compellingly, have the capacity to transform our relationship to learning itself,
in all its mystery, intimacy, difficulty, and wonder.”—Jon Kabat Zinn, author,
Full Catastrophe Living and Mindfulness for Beginners
“Contemplative Practices in Higher Education is truly a breakthrough book,
showing how profound attentiveness, intellectual rigor, and self-knowledge can
be seamlessly woven together. It offers us a transformed view of a student, a
teacher, the academy, and the world.”—Sharon Salzberg, author, Lovingkindness
and Real Happiness
“Visionary, yet immensely practical and thorough! Can enhance the skill,
understanding, and well-being of students and provide the missing half of
education.”—Jack Kornfield, author, A Path with Heart
“At long last we have a comprehensive overview of the burgeoning field of
Contemplative Pedagogy written by two of its leaders and pioneers. This is a
must-read for anyone interested in the theory and practice of Contemplative
Education.”—Harold D. Roth, professor of religious studies and founder and
director, Brown University Contemplative Studies Initiative
“Barbezat and Bush set forth a blueprint for a quiet revolution in education—
placing student experience at the center of our learning objectives, supporting
students in reconnecting with themselves while enabling them to feel their
connections with an ever more diverse world. As our problems grow in com-
plexity, the urgent need for such a revolution becomes clear. These pages hold
the most practical approach yet for a way forward: transforming what happens
in our classrooms, and actually changing the world—one student at a time.”
—Rhonda Magee, professor of law and codirector, Center for Teaching
Excellence, University of San Francisco
“This book tells the wonderful and creative way of expanding and increasing
the possibilities of higher education through contemplative practices. The
authors clearly reveal and express the important and meaningful ties between
teaching and learning and the power of contemplative practices, better
connecting education to life. The best educators often seek ways to expand and
broaden their reach and knowledge—this book will help them achieve that
goal.”—Bradford C. Grant, director, School of Architecture and Design, and
associate dean, College of Engineering, Architecture, and Computer Sciences,
Howard University
“A great guide to developing contemplative courses. ‘Poetry and Meditation,’
the experimental course I taught in Spring 2000 at West Point as a Contempla-
tive Practices Fellow, changed much of what I thought I knew about teaching
and learning, and by doing that, changed my life.”—Marilyn Nelson, chancellor,
Academy of American Poets
“The work represented in this book has been influential and inspirational in
opening the doors to a new dimension of learning. The Institute for Jewish
Spirituality has brought these contemplative practices—text study, reflection
and yoga—into courses in a leading rabbinical school in New York, and thus
magnified the impact of its program of spiritual formation of future rabbis and
cantors enormously, as well as bringing faculty members together in generative
cross-departmental study.”—Rabbi Rachel Cowan, Institute for Jewish
Spirituality
Contemplative Practices
in Higher Education
POWERFUL METHODS TO TRANSFORM
TEACHING AND LEARNING
Daniel P. Barbezat
Mirabai Bush
Foreword by Parker J. Palmer
Afterword by Arthur Zajonc
Cover design by Michael Cook
Cover image: SerJoe © iStockphoto
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C O N T E N T S
Foreword by Parker J. Palmer vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
The Authors xxi
PART ONE  Theoretical and Practical Background  1
1 Transformation and Renewal in Higher Education 3
2 Current Research on Contemplative Practice 21
3 Contemplative Pedagogy in Practice: Two Experiences 39
4 Teacher Preparation and Classroom Challenges 67
PART TWO  A Guide to Contemplative Practices  87
Introduction to the Practices 89
5 Mindfulness 95
6 Contemplative Approaches to Reading and Writing 110
7 Contemplative Senses: Deep Listening and Beholding 137
8 Contemplative Movement 159
9 Compassion and Loving Kindness 174
10 Guest Speakers, Field Trips, and Retreats 189
11 Conclusion 198
Afterword by Arthur Zajonc 205
References 207
Index 217
v
The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series
F O R E W O R D
Parker J. Palmer
When I think about the reforms needed if higher education is
to serve our students and our world faithfully and well, I
think there should be a litmus test for every project that claims to
strengthen the mission of our colleges and universities. Does this
proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that sup-
ports the inseparable causes of truth, love, and justice? If the answer
is no, we should take a pass and redouble our efforts to find a pro-
posal that does.
Of course, many college graduates go on to do socially constructive, occasion-
ally noble, and sometimes heroic things with their lives. But when I look at the
malfeasance of well-educated leaders in business and finance, in health care and
education, in politics and religion, I see too many people whose expert knowl-
edge—and the power that comes with it—has not been joined to a professional
ethic, a sense of communal responsibility, or even simple compassion.
The reasons for this are many and complex. But one culprit is easily named:
the objectivist model of knowing, teaching, and learning that has dominated, and
deformed, higher education. Objectivism begins as an epistemology rooted in a
false conception of science that insists on a wall of separation between the knower
and the known. This, in turn, leads to a pedagogy that keeps students at arm’s
length from the subjects they learn about. And that, in turn, creates an ethical
gap between the educated person and a world that is inevitably impacted by his
vii
or her actions, a failure to embrace the fact that one is a moral actor with com-
munal responsibilities. When this trickle-down effect is at its worst, it contributes
to the process by which “scholars, artists, lawyers, theologians and aristocrats”
end up not just doing wrong but actively collaborating in evil.
These chilling words from Konnilyn G. Feig (1979) are never far from my
mind:
We have identified certain “civilizing” aspects of the modern world—music, art,
a sense of family, love, appreciation of beauty, intellect, education . . . [But] after
Auschwitz we must realize that being a killer, a family man, and a lover of Beethoven
are not contradictions. The killers did not belong to a gutter society of misfits, nor
could they be dismissed as just a collection of rabble. They were scholars, artists,
lawyers, theologians and aristocrats. (p. 57)
This book is important because it offers a powerful corrective to the chain of
philosophical errors that has loosed too many amoral and even immoral educated
people on the world. That corrective involves “contemplative practice,” a phrase
some faculty may find odd or even off-putting in the context of academic culture.
Contemplation may sound like something that belongs in the mystical world of
religion and spirituality, not in the empirical, rational world of the academy.
But as Daniel Barbezat and Mirabai Bush explain with care—and with the
credibility that comes from years of scholarly research and classroom applica-
tion—the contemplative practices described in this book will deepen, not damage,
academic culture. The pedagogical elements found here help students focus more
intently on subjects ranging from physics to literature, connect as whole persons
with what they are learning, and feel more keenly their responsibilities as edu-
cated persons in the larger ecology of human and nonhuman life. These are
outcomes that all good teachers strive for and that this book can help teachers in
every field achieve.
The contemporary movement to bring contemplative practice back to higher
education is now some twenty-five years old. I say “bring contemplative practice
back” because contemplation is nothing new in the academy. It was once part and
parcel of the intellectual life, a legacy of the monastic schools of the early Middle
Ages that are among the ancestors of modern higher education.
At the heart of contemplation is the same quality that is at the heart of all
great scholarship: profound attentiveness to the phenomena that one is trying to
viii Foreword