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Fostering Mindfulness in Education
Helping educators and students develop healthy habits of mind for greater presence, awareness, resilience, and wellbeing.
Helping educators and students develop healthy habits of mind for greater presence, awareness, resilience, and wellbeing.
When introducing mindfulness in academic settings, it's important that it's integrated into a culturally responsive and anti-racist approach within the classroom and larger school community. As educators, we are more likely to be attuned and responsive to the identities, cultures, contexts, histories, backgrounds, abilities, and needs of students and others when equity is at the center of our work. Emerging research shows that mindfulness can reduce prejudice, implicit bias, and biased behaviours. It can also help us respond with more empathy, compassion, and with greater awareness of our interconnectedness and interdependence.
While mindfulness has been shown to support resilience, wellbeing, and social-emotional development, it is important to understand the larger frame around the social conditions (experiences of power, privilege, oppression, discrimination, marginalization, etc.) that influence these.
Mindfulness must not be offered as a way to foster compliance or help students and educators adjust to inequitable and discriminatory conditions. Mindfulness must be offered in trauma-sensitive ways and in tandem with a commitment to teaching about, responding to, and taking action in service of access, equity, and social justice in school systems and beyond.
Copyright © 2020 Shelley Murphy, PhD| Fostering Mindfulness - All Rights Reserved.