The introduction of mindfulness into schools and its potential effects on health and wellbeing promotion have received substantial attention among scholars.However, the implications and consequences thematized by critics of schoolbased mindfulness have yet to receive the same analytical scrutiny. One side has praised mindfulness as a useful instrument to improve students' wellbeing, mental health, and learning outcomes; by contrast, the opposing side has suggested that such practices are yet another quick fix for neoliberal developments in education. Guided by the prospect of leaving behind the binary understanding of mindfulness practices as either highly beneficial or severely harmful, this paper examines and contextualizes the critical discussion of schoolbased mindfulness through a two-step conceptual analysis. First, I unpack how school-based mindfulness has emerged as a specific topic of discussion within the general field of critical mindfulness research. I argue that the critical discourse within the subfield of school-based mindfulness cannot be viewed in isolation from the wider range of critical agendas concerning general applications of mindfulness. Second, I unpack how the majority of critical scholars have adopted a particular critical approach to mindfulness, accentuating its binding entanglement with neoliberalism. In conclusion, I offer prospects for future critical treatments of school-based mindfulness.
Being in the present moment is a key element in most widespread definitions of modern mindfulness. A claim about temporality can thus be said to lie at the core of mindfulness, in which some ways of relating to time are considered subordinate to others; being in the present moment is ascribed higher value than being elsewhere in time. However, although the significance of the present moment is clear, its content and meaning are ambiguous; what temporal states are promoted through mindfulness? This article seeks to theorize this ambiguity by focusing on the specific context of school-based mindfulness as a case in which temporality and education intertwine. Whereas educational research on issues related to time and temporality typically construes time as a condition or resource for educational practices, I argue that school-based mindfulness represents a particular method of making temporality—specifically, the relation between the student self and the present moment—into an object of education. I identify three dimensions of what it means to be in the present moment through empirical examples drawn from a broader study on the educational purposes of school-based mindfulness. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the complexity of the notion of the present moment in school-based mindfulness for future research in this field.
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