Engaging With Meditative Inquiry In Teaching Learning And Research

This collection of multi/inter-disciplinary essays explores the transformative potential of Ashwani Kumar’s work on meditative inquiry – a holistic approach to teaching, learning, researching, creating, and living – in diverse educational contexts. Aspiring to awaken awareness, intelligence, compassion, collaboration, and aesthetic sensibility among students and their teachers through self-reflection, critique, dialogue, and creative exploration, this volume: Showcases unique ways in which scholars from diverse disciplinary, cultural, and geographic contexts have engaged with meditative inquiry in their own fields. Provides a space where African, Asian, Buddhist, Indigenous, and Western scholars engage with the idea of meditative inquiry from their own cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions, perspectives, and practices. Explores a variety of themes in relation to meditative inquiry including arts-based research, poetic inquiry, Africentricity, Indigenous thinking, martial arts, positive psychology, trauma, dispute resolution, and critical discourse analysis. Offers insights into how the principles of meditative inquiry can be incorporated in classrooms and, thereby, contributes to the growing interest in mindfulness, meditation, and other holistic approaches in schools and academia. The diverse and rich contributions contained in this volume offer valuable perspectives and practices for scholars, students, and educators interested in exploring and adopting the principles of meditative inquiry in their specific fields and contexts.

2013 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Review Kumar asks in this volume: Since characteristic features of human consciousness - fear, conditioning, and fragmentation - work against the educational experience, how can we re-imagine curriculum as a space for meditative inquiry and allow it to provide transformative educational experiences to teachers and their students?

This volume highlights lived experiences, personal inspirations and motivations, which have generated scholarship, and influenced the research and teaching of scholars in the field of curriculum studies. Offering contributions from new, established and experienced scholars, chapters foreground the ways in which the authors have been influenced by the mentorship and work of others, by personal challenges, and by the contexts in which they live and work. Chapters also illustrate how scholars have engaged in variety of methodological and autobiographical processes including narrative and poetic inquiry, autoethnography and visual arts research. Through a range of contributions, the book clarifies the origins and legacy of contemporary curriculum studies and in doing so, provides inspiration for beginning scholars and academics as they continue to find their voices in academic communities. Offering rich insight into the experiences and scholarship of a wide range of scholars, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers with an interest in curriculum studies, as well as educational research and methodologies more broadly.

Kumar asks in this volume: Since characteristic features of human consciousness - fear, conditioning, and fragmentation - work against the educational experience, how can we re-imagine curriculum as a space for meditative inquiry and allow it to provide transformative educational experiences to teachers and their students?

This book explores how to render curricular representations more inclusive and how individuals’ interactions with competing historical narratives and discourses shape their civic attitudes and intergroup dynamics. Based on ethnographic research in the Egyptian context, it offers insights for curriculum developers, teacher educators, and teachers interested in the development of critical citizens who are able to engage with multiple narratives and perspectives. Drawing on theorizations of historical consciousness, critical pedagogy, and critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates the need for more nuanced and holistic analytical frameworks and pedagogical tools. Further, it offers insights towards building such analytical and pedagogical approaches to help gain a deeper understanding of connections between students’ historical consciousness tendencies and their civic engagement as citizens.

Providing readers with insights and examples of how teacher educators learn and teach a pedagogy of teacher education (PTE), Butler and Bullock organize a wholistic and practical resource for the next generation of teacher educators. Expanding on the highly referenced scholarship of John Loughran and Tom Russell, Understanding a Pedagogy of Teacher Education explores the learning of PTE through individual and collaborative endeavors, and large-scale institutional and cross-national initiatives. Contributors highlight their experiences teaching PTE in formal learning spaces, in international workshop settings, and on the program-wide scale in order to uncover how they came to understand PTE and enact it effectively. Each chapter connects broad strokes concepts of PTE to well-defined teacher education fields, such as social justice, literacy, early childhood education, and communities of practice. Blending well- established theory with contemporary examples, this book is a great tool for teacher education faculty, doctoral students, and those interested in improving their PTE or supporting others in their PTE learning.

Presence in the Online World: A Contemplative Perspective and Practice Guide for Educators addresses the challenges and possibilities of cultivating contemplative presence in an online teaching environment. It brings together proponents of contemplative pedagogy and experts in online education.

This volume takes up themes emergent from the 7th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry (ISPI) which invited participants to reflect on the United Nations Declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. In this refereed collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors use poetic inquiry to explore the importance of their ancestral languages and lands, and consider the Indigenous languages and peoples of the lands where they live. Situated in diverse global contexts, poet-researchers examine the intersectionality of their languages, their lands, and their sense of belonging. They offer relational understandings of, and articulate obligations for, their environment and communities. Through stories of shared generational pain and renewal, each author brings the reader into their world of learning and growth. They do this through discourses of belonging and relational responsibilities that tie them to a place, a genealogy. As a method of study that incorporates poetry into academic research, poetic inquiry is concerned with particularity, complexity, and transformations. Making research more visceral and evocative, it invites researchers to examine and engage with the knowledge they seek through a continual process of questioning, welcoming, and awareness. In this volume, poetic inquiry helps to honor languages and histories taken for granted; it allows looking back in order to reexamine, redefine, and make sense of the present and its shortcomings while reimagining a different future. This work seeks to reclaim, through poetic inquiry, wisdom of language, land, and belonging.