Integrating Mindfulness Into Anti Oppression Pedagogy

Drawing from mindfulness education and social justice teaching, this book explores an anti-oppressive pedagogy for university and college classrooms. Authentic classroom discussions about oppression and diversity can be difficult; a mindful approach allows students to explore their experiences with compassion and to engage in critical inquiry to confront their deeply held beliefs and value systems. This engaging book is full of practical tips for deepening learning, addressing challenging situations, and providing mindfulness practices in anti-oppression classrooms. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy is for all higher education professionals interested in pedagogy that empowers and engages students in the complex unlearning of oppression.

This volume explores mindfulness and other contemplative approaches as strategic tools for cultivating anti-oppressive pedagogies in higher education. Research confirms that simply providing students with evidence and narratives of economic, social, and environmental injustices proves insufficient in developing awareness and eliciting responses of empathy, solidarity, and a desire to act for change. From the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, legal studies, psychology, and counseling, educators from a range of geographical and disciplinary standpoints describe their research-based mindfulness pedagogies. Chapters explore how to interrupt and interrogate oppression through contemplative teaching tools, assignments, and strategies that create greater awareness and facilitate deeper engagement with learning contents, contexts, and communities. Providing a framework that facilitates awareness of the links between historic and current oppression, self-identity, and trauma, and creating a transformative learning experience through mindfulness, this book is a must-read for faculty and educators interested in intersections of mindfulness, contemplative pedagogies, and anti-oppression.

Contemplative pedagogy is a way for instructors to: empower students to integrate their own experience into thetheoretical material they are being taught in order to deepen theirunderstanding; help students to develop sophisticated problem-solvingskills; support students’ sense of connection to and compassionfor others; and engender inquiries into students’ most profoundquestions. Contemplative practices are used in just about everydiscipline—from physics to economics to history—and arefound in every type of institution. Each year more and morefaculty, education reformers, and leaders of teaching and learningcenters seek out best practices in contemplative teaching, and nowcan find them here, brought to you by two of the foremost leadersand innovators on the subject. This book presents background information and ideas for thepractical application of contemplative practices across theacademic curriculum from the physical sciences to the humanitiesand arts. Examples of contemplative techniques included in the bookare mindfulness, meditation, yoga, deep listening, contemplativereading and writing, and pilgrimage, including site visits andfield trips.

This book weaves together critical components of student development and community building for social justice to prepare students to engage effectively in community-campus partnerships for social change. The author combines diverse theoretical models such as critical pedagogy, asset-based community development, and healing justice with lessons from programs promoting indigenous knowledge, decolonization, and mindfulness. Most importantly, this book links theory to practice, offering service-learning classroom activities, course and community partnership criteria, learning outcomes, and assessment rubrics. It speaks to students, faculty, administrators, and community members who are interested in utilizing community engagement as a vehicle for the development of students and communities towards wellbeing and social justice.

Radiating Feminism: Resilience Practices to Transform Our Inner and Outer Lives is a practical guide to embodying feminist principles not just in our politics, but also in our very ways of being. Bringing together intersectional feminism with mindful reflection and embodied practice, this book offers practical wisdom for living by feminist principles in our daily lives. Each chapter includes practices and interactive activities to help navigate common challenges along feminist journeys. The book also draws on wisdom from feminist leaders and contemporary conversations from social justice movements. Both inspiring and guiding, the book will provide readers with the skills to cultivate resilience to face the many barriers to feminist social transformation. Radiating Feminism will be of use to students of Gender Studies, Social Work, Psychology, Community Health, and the Social Sciences, as well as anyone with a longstanding or fresh commitment to feminism and social justice.

The Handbook of Dewey’s Educational Theory and Practice provides a comprehensive, accessible, richly theoretical yet practical guide to the educational theories, ideals, and pragmatic implications of the work of John Dewey, America’s preeminent philosopher of education.

This guide offers current and future student affairs practitioners a new conceptual framework for identity-conscious and intersectional supervision. Presenting an original and transformative model to address day-to-day challenges, this book gives practitioners a strategic approach to engage in self-work, identity exploration, relationship building, consciousness raising, trust development, and organizational change, ultimately helping them become more adept at supervising people from a range of backgrounds and experiences. Chapters include theoretical underpinnings, practical tips, case studies, and discussion questions to explore strategies in real-life contexts. Identity-Conscious Supervision in Student Affairs is a key tool for student affairs practitioners to effectively change systems of dominance and inequity on their campuses.

In an educational milieu in which standards and accountability hold sway, schools can become places of stress, marginalization, and isolation instead of learning communities that nurture a sense of meaning and purpose. In Ensouling Our Schools, author Jennifer Katz weaves together methods of creating schools that engender mental, spiritual, and emotional health while developing intellectual thought and critical analysis. Kevin Lamoureux contributes his expertise regarding Indigenous approaches to mental and spiritual health that benefit all students and address the TRC Calls to Action.