CONTEMPLATIVE PEDAGOGY: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

• Main Author: SCHULTZ, BRITTANY DIANE
• Other Authors: Kaszniak, Alfred
• Language: en_US
• Published: The University of Arizona. 2016
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/613587; http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/handle/10150/613587

The goal of this study is to examine the effectiveness of contemplative pedagogy. Forty-four honors students completed a course in contemplative pedagogy at a western university. The focus of the course was empathy and compassion. The students partook in a variety of contemplative practices such as loving-kindness meditation, mindfulness meditation, and breath-focused meditation. Over the 15-week course, the students meditated before and after reading articles on contemplative ideas and wrote journal entries each week. The content of the journal entries was broken into categories by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software. A variety of themes were analyzed. Self-report data separated the students into three groups; continuing-meditators, new-meditators, and non-meditators. The journal entries showed an increase in personal pronouns, future tense, causation, and religion words over the course of the semester suggesting. There was a decrease in first person singular pronouns, positive and negative emotion words, and insight. This study provides implications of the effectiveness of contemplative pedagogy and offers a basis for more research in the area.