MEDITATION FOR PERSONAL GROWTH AND CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE: DEVELOPING A CULTURE OF MINDFUL AND REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONERS IN A TEACHER-EDUCATION CONTEXT IN MAURITIUS

Abstract

The study of meditation in educational settings comes with questions about how best to teach it in the unique climates of colleges and universities (Shapiro et al., 2008, p.36). A systematic review of the existing literature by Ergas and Hadar (2019) suggests that previous empirical attempts have been complex and disparate, with the inquiry thus far addressing the subject matter in either one of the two following ways: (i) mindfulness in education, which consists mostly of “outsourced, secularized interventions aimed at improved mental-physical health, social-emotional learning and cognitive functions”, or alternatively, (ii) mindfulness as education, “which is a is a less common yet more transformative approach, manifesting in contemplative pedagogy in higher education and sporadic whole-school implementations” (Ergas & Hadar, 2019, p. 86).
To address the concerns of the research project, we drew from the frame of mindfulness as education to explore the potential value of using mindfulness-based interventions as a means to integrate a holistic philosophy in pre-service teacher education. This focus was driven by the presumptive capacity of the contemplative practice to facilitate the achievement of holistic education (HE) goals, specifically as it pertains to enhancing the education of the ‘whole person’, general wellbeing, and the development of specific dispositional skills fundamental to the learning and teaching process, for example attention, introspection, critical and creative thinking, to name a few. HE distinguishes itself from other frameworks for education as it draws from primordial Western and Asian cultural discourse in order to embed within the education process, a spiritual, or affective, perspective (Miller et al., 2012). In this regard, HE has been broadly described as an educational approach that maintains a fundamental objective of fostering the development of the ‘whole person’. The ‘whole’, as Miller (1990) puts it, includes the intellectual, emotional, physical, social, aesthetic, and - in a secular sense - spiritual. Grounded in the perennial philosophy, spirituality is an embedded component of the holistic philosophy, and therefore it is the tenet which fundamentally guides the practices and philosophy of HE.