meditation in the classroom

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 […]

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: 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 […]

The ideal writing class

Tweet I asked my class today what the ideal writing class would be like.  I haven’t analyzed all that they said, but was surprised by a couple of comments in our class discussion. 1.  They hate peer review, find it useless.  I agree, as presently structured (though I don’t follow the recommended structures).  They do […]

Slowing down the class

Tweet Research has shown (as if we needed much research to know this!) that some students process questions slower than others.  This may be for a variety of reasons, among them that the student may be an introvert or shy, or may be a detailed thinker who wants to pause over certain parts of a […]

Contemplative pedagogy.

Tweet Several major universities and other centers are developing curricula which include contemplative and meditation practices. My own university, Montclair State University, is developing a center of its own, and I have been invited to be a Fellow in the group that will investigate including contemplative practices into our own courses.  I have written several […]