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Mindfulness and Learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education

Authors:
  • Free University of Ireland

Abstract

In recent decades, education at all levels has been seriously impoverished by a growing obsession with standards, targets, skills and competences. According to this model, only a circumscribed range of basic cognitive skills and competences are the business of education, whose main role is to provide employability credentials for people competing for jobs in the global economy. The result is a one-dimensional, economistic and bleakly utilitarian conception of the educational task. In Mindfulness and Learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education, Terry Hyland advances the thesis that education stands in need of a rejuvenation of its affective function – the impact it has on the emotional, social, moral and personal development of learners. Drawing on the Buddhist conception of mindfulness, he advances a powerful argument for redressing this imbalance by enhancing the affective domain of learning. Mindfulness and Learning: Celebrating the Affective Dimension of Education shows how the concept and practice of ‘mindfulness’ – non-judgmental, present moment awareness and experience – can enrich learning at all levels. Mindfulness thus contributes to the enhanced achievement of general educational goals, and helps remedy the gross deficiency of the affective/emotional aspects of contemporary theory and practice. The author outlines a mindfulness-based affective education (MBAE) programme and shows how it might be introduced into educational provision from the early years to adult education with a view to harmonising the cognitive-affective balance across the system.
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Chapters (3)

In the previous chapter a number of characteristic features of mindfulness – both ancient and modern – were examined in the process of investigating the nature and purpose of mindfulness. Chief amongst these was Kabat-Zinn’s description of the seven ‘attitudinal factors’ which function as foundational prerequisites of mindfulness, and these can be connected with the contemplative tradition incorporated in what Hanh (1999) called the (interestingly, the same number) seven miracles of mindfulness. Before examining some of the practical ways of developing mindfulness, it would be useful to expand upon these foundational elements.
This chapter examines the nature, origins and function of emotions, combining philosophical accounts of the connections between reason and passion with descriptions from evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Rational-cognitive perspectives on the education of the emotions are critically analysed and supplemented by an overview of mindfulness-based strategies in this sphere. In conclusion, the findings of neuroscience about the impact of mindfulness on emotional regulation are discussed as a preliminary to the investigation of the affective domain in Chap. 7.
This chapter examines key policy developments in schools, further, higher and adult education in recent years, and seeks to show how failures and shortcomings in the system may be remedied through – alongside other measures advocated by educational commentators and researchers – the incorporation of the MBAE approach outlined in the previous chapter. In addition, the main ideas of the ‘therapeutic turn’ critique are addressed in each section as a way of answering the central critical arguments and further elaborating and justifying my own thesis about the need for a rejuvenation of the affection dimension of education at all levels
... The idea of particular forms of learning and training of the mind as means of escape from the self and suffering was, as mentioned earlier, a principal feature of Schopenhauer's philosophy and is, of course, also central to Buddhist teachings, especially in the increasingly popular mindfulness strategies informed by Buddhist philosophy (Hyland, 2011;Ergas, 2019). It is possible that, like Schopenhauer, Murdoch gained insights about the importance of particular forms of training attention from such Buddhist sources since there are remarkable parallels betweenas Olsson and others have noted (Mole, 2006)the centrality of the role accorded to selfless attention in her general philosophy and the idea of Buddhist mindfulness as the 'self-regulation of attention so that it is maintained on immediate experience...an orientation that is characterised by curiosity, openness and acceptance' (Bishop, 2004,p. ...
... In recent times, mindfulness strategies drawn from these traditions have become something of a boom industry over the last few decades thanks largely to the work of Kabat-Zinn (1990) who developed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme in his work at the Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. There is some evidence of the efficacy of mindfulness practices in treating mental health problems in both medical and educational settings (Hyland, 2011(Hyland, , 2022, but the increasing commercialisation and commodification of such strategies as they have been captured by the neoliberal marketdescribed by Purser (2019) as 'McMindfulness'needs to be taken into account if such approaches are to be utilised in university settings. ...
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