6th Annual Summer Session on
Contemplative Curriculum Development

August 8 - 13, 2010
Smith College, Northampton, MA

Information Page for Participants

Summer Session Participants will devote the week to rigorous investigation, reflection, writing, and discussion, guided by distinguished scholars and contemplative teachers who have already developed such courses.

There will be sessions on pedagogical issues, including the relation between course content and contemplative practice and the benefits of stabilized attention and other qualities of mind fostered by meditation, as well as on practical issues such as evaluation, grading, instructional techniques, and use of off-site facilities. We will also consider issues such as communicating course intent with colleagues and college administrators. There will be discussions on how contemplative practices in the curriculum are affecting teaching and learning nationwide. Local scholars and contemplative teachers not listed as faculty will visit and engage in the discussions. Each day will also include substantial contemplative practice time, which will introduce participants to practices from a variety of traditions as well as practices that have been adapted successfully for secular classroom settings. The summer session aims to prepare participants to return to their classrooms with a deeper understanding of the practice of contemplative teaching and a fully developed course.

The summer session builds on the work of the Contemplative Practice Fellowship Program. These fellowships seek to restore and renew the critical contribution that contemplative practices can make to the life of teaching and scholarship. At the heart of the program is the belief that pedagogical and intellectual benefits will be discovered by bringing contemplative practice into the academy. While contemplative practices are part of all major religious and spiritual traditions, they have also had a place in intellectual and ethical inquiry, including secular educational environments. Contemplative practices are defined in a variety of ways, but they can be broadly understood as methods to develop concentration, deepen understanding and insight, and cultivate awareness and compassion.

We invite participants from the full range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities, sciences, humanities-related sciences, and social sciences. We are especially interested in the development of courses in which classroom contemplative practices are related clearly to the content of the course itself. Such content-related contemplative practices can lead to genuine insights and deeper appreciation of the material under study.

Further information on the content of the session can be inferred from the Academic Program's lectures, reports, and publications. You may also find our selection of course syllabi to be a helpful reference.

2010 Faculty

Linda-Susan Beard
Associate Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College

Mirabai Bush
Associate Director and Senior Fellow, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

Geri DeLuca
Professor of English, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Renée Hill
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Virginia State University

Peter Schneider
Professor of Architecture and Chancellor’s Scholar, University of Colorado

Joel Upton
Professor of Art and Art History, Amherst College

Arthur Zajonc
Professor of Physics, Amherst College
Director, The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society

 

Faculty Bios

Linda-Susan Beard (Ph.D., Cornell) negotiates between and among the worlds of African American, South African, and post-colonial literatures. She teaches courses on post-apartheid literature, literary and historical reimaginings of transatlantic slavery such as Toni Morrison and the Art of Narrative Conjure, as well as introductory courses in English and African literatures which examine the dynamics of canon formation. She is editing the first comprehensive volume of the letters of Bessie head, about whom she has written essays and given conference papers for 25 years. She is also involved in the new area of contemplative intelligence, having been in the first group of the Center’s Contemplative Practice Fellows. King's College recently awarded her an honorary doctorate for her work in integrating contemplative and intellectual ways of knowing. She served for five years as Faculty Coordinator of the Mellon Scholars Program and chair of the Africana Studies Program.

 

Mirabai Bush was a co-founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and served as Executive Director until 2008. Under her direction, The Center developed its programs in education, law, business, and activism and its network of thousands of people integrating contemplative practice and perspective into their lives and work.

Mirabai holds a unique background of organizational management, teaching, and spiritual practice. A founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization, she directed the Seva Guatemala Project, which supports sustainable agriculture and integrated community development. Also at Seva, she co-developed Sustaining Compassion, Sustaining the Earth, a series of retreats and events for grassroots environmental activists on the interconnection of spirit and action. She is co-author, with Ram Dass, of Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service, published by Random House.

Mirabai has organized, facilitated, and taught workshops, weekends, and courses on spirit and action for more than 20 years at institutions including Omega Institute, Naropa Institute, Findhorne, Zen Mountain Monastery, University of Massachusetts, San Francisco Zen Center, Buddhist Study Center at Barre, MA, Insight Meditation Society, and the Lama Foundation. She has a special interest in the uncovering and recovery of women's spiritual wisdom to inform work for social change. She has taught women's groups with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Sharon Salzberg, Joan Halifax, Margo Adler, Starhawk, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Vicky Noble, and other leaders.

Her spiritual studies include meditation study at the Burmese Vihara in Bodh Gaya, India, with Shri S.N. Goenka and Anagarika Munindra; bhakti yoga with Hindu teacher Neemkaroli Baba; and studies with Tibetan lamas Kalu Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Kyabje Gehlek Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and others. She also did five years of intensive practice in Iyengar yoga and five years of Aikido with Kanai Sensei. Her earlier religious study included 20 years of Catholic schooling, ending with Georgetown University graduate study in medieval literature. She holds an ABD in American literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Before entering the foundation world, Mirabai was the first professional woman to work on the Saturn-Apollo moonflight at Cape Canaveral and later co-founded and directed Illuminations, Inc., from 1973 to 1985 in Cambridge, MA. Her innovative business approaches, based on mindfulness practice, were reported in Newsweek, Inc., Fortune, and the Boston Business Journal. She has also worked on educational programs with inner-city youth of color.

Mirabai has trekked, traveled, and lived in many countries, including Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, India, Nepal, Morocco, Ireland, England, Scotland, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Germany, Austria, Italy, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. She is an organic gardener in Western Massachusetts and the mother of one adult son, Owen.

 

Geri DeLuca just retired as a professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She now lives mostly in Vermont, where she is writing both fiction and a series of essays on the uses of contemplative practice in the classroom. A contemplative practice fellow in 2005 - 2006, she learned quickly how hungry her students were for a mindful, less competitive pedagogy. That pedagogy has included more insistently over the years a respect for students' own language and a wariness of the assumption that one must correct students to prepare them for the real world. Her presentation/workshop addresses the huge, but often unconsidered question of how dialect plays out in classrooms: what includes and what alienates students, what the repercussions are of that alienation, and how we can begin to nudge that bogey-man of the "real world" toward a wider consciousness of who really lives there.

 

Renée Hill is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Virginia State University. Her area of specialization is Political Philosophy, and for twelve years she was Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Race Relations at VSU.  She has practiced meditation for over thirty years, and she and the other Institute Co-Director are currently developing a graduate program in Justice and Transformation, focusing on personal and community transformation through the study of social activism and contemplative practices.  Hill is a board member of the Richmond Peace Education Center, and is working with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to develop programs using contemplative practices to ameliorate the effects of violence.

 

Peter Schneider was born and educated in South Africa, where he taught and practiced architecture before moving to the United States in 1977. He is currently Professor of Architecture and Chancellor’s Scholar at the University of Colorado, and teaches architectural and environmental design and theory at the university’s Boulder and Denver campuses. His scholarly and research interests have been focused on the history of the architect: on the architect’s mind, motives, manners, and mythologies and in the way that these attitudes have shaped the discipline’s traditions. His particular focus has been on exploring and understanding the persistent influence that the practices of contemplatio and meditatio – both terms rooted in architecture’s ancient history - have had on the shapes and forms of contemporary architectural practice.  His writings on the history of the architect, architectural pedagogy, the interactions of building and landscape, and the architect's contemplative methods and practices have been widely published, as have his researches into the work of the young American architect, Douglas Darden.

 

Joel Upton is Professor of Art and Art History at Amherst College. After graduation from Rutgers University his path led from the U.S. Air Force to the Goethe Institute in Berlin, and in 1972 to Amherst.  He teaches courses on the history of Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture, Japanese pre-modern architecture and the spiritual foundations of artistic aspiration. His teaching interests include the theory and practice of contemplative “beholding” and his current research concerns Ai-no-ma, a Japanese architectural and spatial concept that is a Japanese equivalent of the art of beholding.

 

Arthur Zajonc is professor of physics at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1978. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan. He has been visiting professor and research scientist at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, and the Universities of Rochester and Hannover. He has been Fulbright professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics he researched electron-atoms collision physics and radiative transfer in dense vapors. His research has included studies in parity violation in atoms, the experimental foundations of quantum physics, and the relationship between sciences, the humanities and contemplation. He has written extensively on Goethe's science. He is author of the books Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry, Catching the Light, co-author of The Quantum Challenge, and co-editor of Goethe's Way of Science. In 1997 he served as scientific coordinator for the Mind and Life dialogue with H.H. the Dalai Lama published as The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama (Oxford 2004). He again organized the 2002 dialogue with the Dalai Lama, “The Nature of Matter, the Nature of Life,” and acted as moderator at MIT for the “Investigating the Mind” dialogue in 2003 (seewww.mindandlife.org). He has also been General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America (1994-2002), president of the Lindisfarne Association, and a senior program director at the Fetzer Institute.

 

Contact Us

If you have any questions, please contact Beth Wadham, Academic Program Associate, at beth@contemplativemind.org or 413-582-0071.