Scottish Higher Education Developers October 2018 | Page 12

DEVELOPING CONTEMPLATIVE
PRACTICES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Iddo Oberski, Queen Margaret University
Queen Margaret University’s Student Experience Strategy focuses on:
• enabling all students to have a transformative experience
• student-centred learning and engagement and
• communities where students can flourish.
Contemplative practices enable these aims to be met through:
• developing affective, contemplative and relational perspectives: An ‘epistemology of
love’
• fostering different ways of knowing and deep learning that result in meaningful
understanding and application
• fostering an understanding of interconnectedness and wholeness, respectively (e.g.
Ergas 2017, Rose 2013, Zajonc 2009).
There is a growing interest in
contemplative practices in higher
education, including mindfulness
meditation, and evidence that they
help in alleviating stress (e.g. Greeson
et al 2015), enhance concentration
(e.g. Altobello 2007) and deepen
learning (e.g. Barbezat and Bush 2014).
There are different approaches to
the conceptualisation of why these
practices may have those effects.
For example, the new discipline of
contemplative neuroscience makes
visible the significant differences in
brain images using fMRI in ex perienced
The Tree of Contemplative Practices
meditators and novice meditators. At
Image: The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
the same time, a more epistemological
http://www.contemplativemind.org
understanding might argue that
these practices help learners to become conscious of what might be called the
‘inner curriculum’ (Ergas 2017) and thus provide the possibility for tackling unwanted
distraction, eroded concentration and mind energy spillage.
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Celebrating 25 years of SHED