'Mindful Engagement and Relational Lawyering' by Susan L. Brooks in (2019) 48
Southwestern University Law Review comments
Mindful engagement is a relational approach to mindfulness, and a mindful approach to being relational, in law and in life. It is about cultivating habits of mind and practices that can inform a wholehearted approach to lawyering, which means bringing our emotional and bodily awareness as well as our analytical minds fully into our work. Mindful engagement contemplates the interconnection and integration of engagement with oneself, with others interactively, and with communities and larger social institutions and systems.
This definition of mindful engagement resonates with the work of mindfulness scholars and researchers Ron Purser and David Loy, who focus on the distinction between mindful engagement and mindfulness as a method solely for personal self-fulfillment. While acknowledging the possible value of a more individualistic approach to mindfulness, they embrace an engaged approach as offering greater potential to reflect on and address the causes and conditions of suffering in the broader environment. In their view, to become a genuine force for positive personal and social transformation, mindfulness must reclaim an ethical framework and aspire to purposes that take into account the well-being of all living beings.
The purpose of this article is to build upon and contribute to the work of these and other scholars and teachers across many disciplines who believe mindful engagement can lead to more healing and other positive change in the world. My specific focus is on how we can use the relational lawyering framework I have been developing to teach and support mindful engagement as a set of core competencies in legal education and law practice, and through that effort, reduce suffering and improve the wellbeing of the legal profession and the communities we serve.
'Mindfulness In and As Education: A Map of a Developing Academic Discourse from 2002 to 2017' by
Oren Ergas and Linor L. Hadar in (2019) 7(3)
Review of Education comments
Since the turn of the millennium there has been a clear rise in the implementation and research of mindfulness across primary, secondary and postsecondary education. These implementations, however, hardly constitute a uniform phenomenon. They reflect a variety of framings, modalities and educational aims, as documented in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. To date no overarching review has provided an empirically-based mapping of this multifaceted and rapidly developing discourse. This paper offers a first-of-its-kind map of mindfulness in education based on the 447 peer-reviewed papers published between 2002 and 2017 that constitute this academic discourse, applying grounded theory methodology. The research reveals an exponential rise in the amount of publications over years, with a complex discourse that evolves from seven different framings of the practice, applied to nine different educational domains and through various types of implementation. It maps this complexity and outlines two main patterns that reflects this discourse to date: a) Mindfulness in education, which comprises mostly of outsourced, secularized interventions aimed at improved mental-physical health, social-emotional learning and cognitive functions. b) Mindfulness as education, which is a more transformative strand characterized by contemplative pedagogy in higher education and sporadic whole-school implementations. Overall, in the studied period mindfulness has been moving from near-anonymity toward the mainstream; however, this discourse reflects a nascent phase given that it is only beginning to critique itself. Furthermore, its two patterns reflect a split discourse that is challenged by the practice’s psychological-secular framing and its Buddhist framing.
The authors state
In the past two decades, the practice of mindfulness - “paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 4) - has become ubiquitous. Studies of its effects on various aspects of psychological well-being and health have spurred the interest of the scientific community leading to an exponential rise in its implementation, research and critique (Brown, Craswell, & Ryan, 2015; Purser, Forbes, & Burke, 2016; Schonert-Reichl & Roeser, 2016). The American Mindfulness Research Association (AMRA) documented over 3700 studies published on mindfulness reflecting an exponential rise from 0 publications in 1980 to 690 in 2016 and 692 in 2017 (Black, 2018). Many of these studies have been funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and demonstrated effects of mindfulness on improved well-being, stress-reduction, and enhanced attention regulation, within both clinical and general populations (Brown et al, 2015; Keng, Smoski & Robins, 2011; Zoogman, Goldberg, Hoyt, & Miller, 2015).
Parallel to and as part of these development, there has been a clear rise in the implementation and study of mindfulness across ages within educational settings, as documented in several peer-reviewed studies, reviews and special issues (Felver & Jennings, 2016; Frank, Jennings & Greenberg, 2013; Kiloran, 2017; Meiklejohn et al, 2012; Moreno, 2017; Renshaw & Cook, 2017; Roeser, 2014; Schonert-Reichl & Roeser, 2016; Weare, 2013; Zenner, Herrnleben & Wallach, 2014). Key organizations, such as the Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP) in UK, and MINDUP in the US, have been developing mindfulness curricula, training school teachers and disseminating these practices in hundreds of schools worldwide (Kuyken et al, 2013; Maloney, Lawlor, Schonert-Reichl, & Whitehead, 2016). According to reviews and to some of these mentioned organizations, these curricula have reached thousands of teachers and millions of students spanning all ages (Ergas, 2018; Semple, Droutman & Reid, 2017). Research of mindfulness in education has now expanded to huge state-funded projects, such as the Oxford Mindfulness Center’s MYRIAD, which includes 84 UK schools (approx. 6000 students).
The term “mindfulness in education”, however, hides a perplexing diversity that a deeper scrutiny of publications in this field demonstrates. To begin with, many of the above initiatives involve mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) - outsourced programs developed based on Jon Kabat Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) format, and adapted for teachers and/or students (Cullen, 2011; Jennings et al, 2017; Kabat Zinn, 2017; Roeser, 2014). However, implementations of mindfulness practice in education have also been developing within “contemplative pedagogy” (Ergas, 2018; Repetti, 2010). Here mindfulness is integrated into teaching in order to enhance meaningful and transformative learning processes often in higher education and within education in the professions (Bush, 2011; Magee, 2016). When examining publication in these two domains one finds that mindfulness is implemented across educational settings based on highly diverse modalities, definitions, framings, and aims. This diversity begins with the practice itself, which is framed in variety of ways, such as attentional training, mental training, meta-cognitive practice, spiritual practice, meditation, Buddhist meditation, and contemplative inquiry (Bishop et al, 2004; Davidson et al., 2012; Hanh, 2016; Kabat-Zinn, 1994; Owen-Smith, 2017; Roeser, 2014; Roth, 2006, Shapiro et al., 2015; Wong, 2004). These latter terms and others are sometimes associated with a psychological discourse (Kabat-Zinn, 1994), at other times with the practice’s Buddhist or other wisdom-tradition origins (Hoyt, 2016), and yet at other times with a way of knowing-inquiring (Hart, 2004; Roth, 2006). When further probing the psychological discourse, one finds some MBIs associated with cognitive functions (e.g., Flook et al, 2010), others with the affective and social-emotional domain (e.g., Beddoe & Murphy, 2004), and yet others with mental-physical and occupational health (e.g., Crain, Schonert-Reichl & Roeser, 2017).
The complexity in this discourse further manifests in implementations that span interventions that are as short as four sessions (Zenner et al., 2014) to holistic approaches integrating mindfulness across the curriculum (Tarrasch et al., 2017). Yet, the most perplexing domain that manifests the breadth and diversity in this discourse concerns how they are associated with educational aims. Pointing to a mere few examples, one finds MBIs addressing teacher stress, burnout and social-emotional competencies (Jennings et al, 2017), enhancement of executive functions in primary school (Flook et al, 2010), improving Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) performance (Mrazek et al, 2013), but also contemplative pedagogies that aim to cultivate self-knowledge and awareness (Holland, 2004), a first-person critical perspective (Roth, 2006), and ethics of diversity (Berila, 2014). Professional education reveals additional avenues with higher education courses in which mindfulness is implemented toward cultivating empathy in training nurses (Beddoe & Murphy, 2004), spirituality and compassion in social work education (Wong, 2004), reducing cognitive and emotional biases in law students (Magee, 2016), and engendering healthy habits of mind and compassion in teaching (Roeser, Skinner, Beers, Jennings, 2012).
The above is a very rough gloss over what appears to be a highly complex and confusing discourse. Mindfulness in education is developing in multiple directions to the point at which it becomes unclear what holds this discourse together and, in fact whether this is one discourse at all? How is it possible that a practice (or set of practices) that goes by the same name is responsible for all of these aims, some of which seem to be pulling in almost contradicting directions? Where is mindfulness in education going?
One potential explanation for the variety described emerges from the multiple framings of this practice mentioned above. Mindfulness has a unique biography that begins in the 6-5th centuries BC within Buddhism, yet in the late 20th century it was reframed as a psychological-clinical and secularized practice (Gethin, 2011; Kabat-Zinn, 1994; Olendzki, 2011; Purser et al, 2016; Roeser, 2013). However, this only leads to further questions. What is a practice that has its origins in Buddhism doing in contemporary public schools; especially when this occurs in countries such as the US that stress the separation of Church and State? How secular/religious is this discourse? Indeed, there have been lawsuits filed against schools who implemented the practice, accusing them of proselytizing Buddhism to students (Gregoire, 2013; Parker, 2018). Sensitive to this issue, implementers of mindfulness have hence often been grounding the practice in scientific-psychological constructs and avoiding Buddhist terminology (Jennings, 2016; Nelson, 2012). However, this trend has lead to other types of critique often referred to as ‘McMindfulness’, revolving around the commodification of mindfulness, its uprooting from its ethical underpinnings and its construal as a panacea (Forbes, 2019; Hyland, 2017; Purser & Loy, 2013). Scientists themselves have been warning against the “hype” around mindfulness that reflects an enthusiasm that the present state of research does not justify (Greenberg & Harris, 2012; Van dam et al., 2018).
These and other challenging perspectives, in fact reflect an additional strand within the general discourse of mindfulness and within mindfulness in education. It is comprised of critical perspectives that point to the ways in which social, political, cultural and economic forces shape mindfulness as it enters educational settings (Purser et al, 2016). Taking the above introduction and these critical perspectives, we are facing a situation in which a practice that in the course of approximately two decades, has transitioned from near- anonymity and an association with monks, spiritual seekers and ancient times, to a vibrant academic discourse that seems to be moving into the mainstream of education. This is happening in an extremely rapid pace and in multiple ways that are becoming difficult to understand. Such situation calls us to question what is this novel addition to the curriculum bringing into contemporary education? Is it introducing religiosity/spirituality in disguise? Is it a technique for reducing stress? Is it about improving academic achievements? Is it about all of these? Is it the same phenomenon in primary education as it is in higher education?
The current research responds to this confusion by developing a first-of-its-kind empirically-based map of the discourse of mindfulness in education. To the best of our knowledge, no previous review that takes into consideration all manifestations of this field has been offered. Previous reviews in this field usually relied on relatively small numbers of cases and focused either on MBIs or on contemplative pedagogies, either centering around their effects or on their ways of implementation (e.g., Bush, 2011; Lomas et al., 2017; Meiklejohn et al., 2012; Moreno, 2017; Zenner et al.’s, 2014). While no doubt necessary and informative, such reviews fail to provide a map of the entire discourse and its development as a whole. The current research is hence not a review of the effects of the practice, neither a paper that advocates or critiques its implementation in education. It is about understanding what is going on? What has been published in this field? What kind of voices are emerging in it? What are the main characteristics of this discourse and is it one discourse or many? Specifically, we aim to (a) map the discourse, the aims and framings of mindfulness across public and secular educational settings. (b) Investigate to what extent is mindfulness in education a spiritual/religious/Buddhist practice. (c) Map curricular patterns and types of implementations of mindfulness in these settings. (d) Identify developed and underdeveloped domains within the discourse and suggest future directions.
The map that this research aims to develop has both theoretical and practical significance. It enables for a broader conception of the various directions that this discourse entails and their respective breadth, robustness and/or weakness. This expands limited understandings of mindfulness in education by taking into consideration multiple components of this discourse (e.g., types of research, framings of mindfulness, modalities of implementation) and enables those working in the field to locate their work within it in more sophisticated and nuanced ways. Finally, it points us to neglected theoretical and practical domains and hence opens the field for further development.
