contemplative pedagogy

How to Write Descriptions (continued)

Tweet A previous post shared the first part of a class on writing descriptions. The first exercise was writing a description of a classmate. This is the second part of that class. Exercise: The class was asked to close their eyes, and I turned off the lights. They then were asked to pull up their very […]

How to Write Descriptions

Tweet For the next essay “A Visit to Another Culture,” my students must physically place themselves in a new culture — it can be a new type of restaurant, a church service of another religion, dinner in the home of an immigrant friend, a visit to a Japanese supermarket, and so on. In the several […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Standing Meditations

Tweet The class has insisted all semester on keeping to our Thursday meditation schedule. It has been a challenge to think up new meditations.  My role is to conduct a writing class, not a meditation class. The goal is to introduce them to the concept of meditation, and to allow them to experience the feelings […]

Student comments

Tweet At the end of every semester, students are asked to write a reflection.  For the first freshman course, it is to reflect on one of the principles of good writing they learned, and in the second freshman course, they are to reflect on something they read which touched or interested them. Marios was in […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Evaluating contemplative practices

Tweet I can’t report that I meditate daily or even weekly, but there were times in my life, difficult times, when meditation was a daily aid. I learned skills and habits that still help me today.  I am, in other words, well aware of both the power and the long-lasting nature of discoveries and habits […]

Contemplative pedagogy: A creative meditation

Tweet This meditation took place between the clarification in class of the goal for the next essay, and each student’s attempt to narrow his or her focus. The lights went out, the door was closed, the students set themselves up by adjusting their posture and taking a few breaths.  I asked them to turn their […]

Contemplative pedagogy: Names

Tweet Naming things is an important concept in linguistics.  People have cute, or crazy, or insulting names for people and things in their lives, and that is an area for productive study. Grandmother names are my present fixation — I am called Granna. I remember the struggle after 9/11 to find a name for the […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: “Eat it immediately.”

Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on Contemplative Pedagogy which often focuses as much on the absence of language as on its form. In his book Meditation in Action, Chögyam Trungpa writes: “…one usually finds that books, teachings, lectures, and so on are more concerned with proving that they are right than […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Going Deeper

Tweet This post is part of an ongoing series on contemplative practices in the writing classroom. It is about the absence of language as much as language itself. Following a challenging autumn, during which we had a terrible hurricane, a contentious election, and the shootings at Newtown in which little children were mowed down with […]

Contemplative Pedagogy: Activating the Imagination

Tweet This post is one of a series on contemplative pedagogy, where the subject is as much the absence of language as language itself. In an essay writing class, a fictionalizing imagination is not necessary, but students must think of everyday events and reactions in new ways, and must link these events and reactions to […]