Safeguarding Mindfulness in Schools and Higher Education


Book Description

Although mindfulness can be located in a number of different traditions and disciplines, it was originally an esoteric and powerful practice based on developing a capacity attainable only by certain people. After previously publishing on the positive outcomes, in this book the author identifies a range of adverse effects of mindfulness meditation for some individuals that, from the point of view of mindfulness in schools and higher education, represents uncharted territory. The author demonstrates through research, personal experience and case studies how mindfulness activities can be safe for all students in education settings including the most vulnerable. This book assists teachers in school and higher education settings to make informed decisions about whether to include mindfulness in their teaching, depending on their own capacity, student cohorts and activities to make sure it is safe for more vulnerable students. This guidance is based on a combination of existing pedagogical and clinical knowledge about meeting the needs of vulnerable students, clients and patients and the specialized expertise of trained mindfulness clinicians and teachers. This book puts school and university teachers in the driver’s seat as regards mindfulness teaching in education settings. It argues that the only way forward for mindfulness in education is to adopt an individualized approach which builds on what effective teachers already do in their work with vulnerable students through extending their knowledge about mindfulness and its possible effects. In this way teachers’ existing skills are celebrated and extended, and mindfulness pedagogy develops organically with teachers, becoming a genuine and felt experience both for themselves and their students rather than an ‘add-on’ intervention.




Mindfulness-Based Teaching and Learning


Book Description

Mindfulness-Based Teaching and Learning is the first comprehensive survey text exploring the history, research, theory, and best practices of secular-scientific mindfulness. With a focus on how mindfulness is taught and learned, this book is an invaluable resource for aspiring or expert mindfulness specialists. Integrating and defining the emerging field of MBTL within a common purpose, evidence-base, and set of transprofessional—and transformational—practices, the book provides both a visionary agenda and highly practical techniques and tools. Chapters provide curriculum design and teaching tips, explore the expert-validated MBTL-TCF competency framework, and reveal insights into the ways self-awareness can evolve into ecological awareness through intensive retreats.




Empowering Students as Self-Directed Learners of Qualitative Research Methods


Book Description

Qualitative research instructors seek information to help students actively engage in qualitative inquiry. They desire to learn about innovative, constructivist approaches that connect and empower students as a community of learners. Empowering Students as Self-Directed Learners of Qualitative Research Methods meets these needs with practices and approaches instructors may use to position students as active, empowered, self-directed learners who learn to do qualitative research by doing qualitative research. Students will find this book useful because it includes authentic student work, student reflections, factual classroom scenarios depicting professors guiding students as they devise research questions and determine the qualitative genre to best answer those questions as well as a chapter that includes a checklist to help students plan, revise, and edit the academic writing critical for communicating qualitative research. The book blends the thoughts of international scholars with the voices of students of qualitative research methods who participated in the transformative practices described in the book. The collective ideas meet the instructional, cultural, and psychological needs of diverse learners, including students from various disciplines, exceptionally able students, those with creative and artistic aptitudes, those from marginalized populations, English language learners, and those who struggle to master qualitative research methods. Contributors are: Christy Bebeau, Alisha Braun, Franz Breuer, Suzanne Franco, Anna Gonzalez-Pliss, Steven Haberlin, Alfredo Jornet, Yew Jin Lee, Erin Lunday, Janet Richards, Wolff-Michael Roth, Kia Sarnoff, Margrit Schreier, and William Thomas.




Implementing Mindfulness in Schools


Book Description

Implementing Mindfulness in Schools aims to provide practical, trustworthy and evidence-based guidance on developing mindfulness in schools and in the whole community who work and learn there. It attempts to bring some clarity to an area of education that is growing fast, and with very promising evidence and much enthusiasm from schools, but which can be confusing and is often riddled with misunderstandings. The guidance is based on: international scientific evidence of the outcomes of mindfulness in schools. international empirical research on implementing and embedding mindfulness in schools for teachers and students. advice from a range of experts, drawn from innovators in schools, programme developers, researchers and academics and contemplative practitioners. The guidance is for a range of audiences: those who are actively working in the 3-18 UK education systems initiating, leading and developing practical work on in school settings, or policy mindfulness, with children and young people and the adults who work with them. The detail and application of the advice has a specifically UK focus. those from other parts of the world who are working in this area, and who should find the principles and the evidence base on outcomes and implementation relevant to their situation. those programme makers who are developing and leading mindfulness courses and practices specifically for use in schools or with young people. those who are working in related areas such as compassion, mental health, emotional and social education, personal development and reflective learning who want to explore what policy and practice around mindfulness has to offer in the joint effort to make schools more humane and effective places. those who are broadly interested in what is happening with mindfulness in schools.




The Buddha Pill


Book Description

Millions of people meditate daily but can meditative practices really make us ‘better’ people? In The Buddha Pill, pioneering psychologists Dr Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm put meditation and mindfulness under the microscope. Separating fact from fiction, they reveal what scientific research – including their groundbreaking study on yoga and meditation with prisoners – tells us about the benefits and limitations of these techniques for improving our lives. As well as illuminating the potential, the authors argue that these practices may have unexpected consequences, and that peace and happiness may not always be the end result. Offering a compelling examination of research on transcendental meditation to recent brain-imaging studies on the effects of mindfulness and yoga, and with fascinating contributions from spiritual teachers and therapists, Farias and Wikholm weave together a unique story about the science and the delusions of personal change.




Empowering Mindfulness for Women


Book Description

Empowering Mindfulness for Women is centred around a a 5-day intensive mindfulness course attended by eight women from different backgrounds. The reader is invited to imagine they are actively participating in the teaching and learning moments and turning points encountered in teaching and learning mindfulness around themes such as making space for mindfulness, safeguarding mindfulness for women, engendering mindfulness, mindfulness dreaming and a mandala of wisdoms. Evocative accounts of experience bring to life the women’s growing awareness that mindfulness can be both a separate practice and a natural part of life and that it can help them to nurture what they have neglected in themselves by not tapping into the full spectrum of their experience. Each chapter provides useful follow-up activities and questions for individual or group reflection, journaling, sharing and conversation. Empowering Mindfulness for Women is aimed at those who teach mindfulness to women in educational, community or clinical settings and at women who want to learn mindfulness in a manner that positions them as experts in their own learning.




Building and Sustaining a Teaching Career


Book Description

This text supports pre-service teachers in developing mindfulness strategies as they undertake professional experience.




Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice


Book Description

Trauma and the exposure to traumatic events is part of life, making the need for current and informed social work research and training in this area essential. Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice highlights unique and diverse circumstances throughout a client’s lifecycle where trauma is experienced, how one’s spirituality is awakened or activated, and how this experience can intersect with interventions toward posttraumatic growth (PTG). More than just a primer on trauma effects, the book offers social workers insights into how to properly assess current resources and individual levels of distress. It also provides practical strategies on how spirituality and spiritual practices can be integrated into psychotherapeutic interventions at various levels of social work practice. Addressing the impact of trauma-related events and emphasizing the importance of spirituality, the book will inspire and provide transferable knowledge that social workers can use to meet the unique needs of the clients, families, and communities they serve.




Teaching Social Work


Book Description

Social work education has the potential to be transformative, consciousness raising, and to produce social change while inspiring hope in students for the creation of more just systems. An understanding of oppression, its diverse manifestations, and its differential impact on vulnerable individuals and groups is essential to contemporary social work education. What then is the best manner in which to prepare educators for the immensely important, complex, and multidimensional role as teacher of social work? Most social work instructors learn to teach through trial and error, bringing their own style, experiences, and preferences to the endeavour rather than having a formal program of education and instruction on how to best educate and instruct. This book addresses the complex and uncertain field of social work education, gathering together thirty experienced professors and practitioners who teach in BSW, MSW, and PhD programs. Together, the contributors create a framework for social work educators to reflect on how they teach, why they teach in specific ways, and what works best for teaching in the discipline of social work.




Promoting Behavioral Health and Reducing Risk among College Students


Book Description

Promoting Behavioral Health and Reducing Risk Among College Students synthesizes the large body of research on college students’ behavioral health and offers guidance on applying evidence-based prevention and early intervention strategies using a comprehensive public health framework. Chapters authored by leading researchers and practitioners address a broad spectrum of important behavioral health issues, interventions, and challenges. Moving beyond a theoretical discussion to strategies for implementation, this book addresses the special issues and potential barriers faced by practitioners as they translate research to practice, such as resource limitations, organizational resistance, challenges to program sustainability, and the unique needs of special populations. This cutting-edge compendium will appeal to both practitioners and researchers involved in providing prevention, early intervention, and treatment services for college students.