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: 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 […]
Contemplative pedagogy: Disrupting time
Tweet This is one of an ongoing series of posts on contemplative pedagogy. It focuses on lack of language rather than on language itself. One of the bugabears of essay writing is making too many assumptions, from “everybody” thinks this, to “My father never uses swearwords.” One of the challenges of the writing teacher is […]
Concentration, not Meditation
Tweet My class has asked (by vote of 19-1) for regular meditation exercises. We do them once a week. I will document those in subsequent posts, but yesterday we did a variation — a concentration exercise. A case could be made that because of multi-tasking and the constant electronic intrusion into their lives, students rarely […]