National Collegiate Honors Council

 

Date of this Version

2024

Document Type

Article

Citation

Honors in Practice (2024) 20; National Collegiate Honors Council; Guest editor: John Zubizarreta

Comments

Copyright 2024, National Collegiate Honors Council. Used by permission.

Abstract

What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among students who conceptualize both mindfulness and honors education as “doing more” (more exercises to gain psychological benefits and more work to gain higher GPAs), the authors of this paper piloted a new course in philosophy and religious studies. In this essay, they discuss their collaborative experience designing, co-teaching, and assessing an honors course on mindfulness: its roots in Buddhist thought and practices, its contemporary secular developments, and its potential impact on students’ learning and lived experience. Integral to this experiment is also an approach to teaching philosophy and religious studies in the context of a general education curriculum that aims at presenting the disciplines and their focus areas as forms of collaborative experiential learning.

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