Mindfulness for teachers: notes toward a discursive cartography

Abstract

Purpose For the interested teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher seeking an entry point into how mindfulness relates to teachers’ work, the burgeoning and divergent appeals for the relevance of mindfulness to teachers can be bewildering. The purpose of this paper is to offer teachers, teacher educators and educational researchers a conceptual framework for understanding the different orientations and sources of mindfulness as it has been recommended to teachers. Design/methodology/approach Using Foucault’s (1972) concept of “discursive formations” as a heuristic device, this paper argues that mindfulness as pitched to teachers can be helpfully understood as arising from three distinct orientations. Findings Statements about mindfulness and its relevance to teachers emerge from three distinct discursive formations – traditional, psychological and engaged – that each constitute the “problem” faced by teachers respectively as suffering, stress or alienation. Specific conceptions of mindfulness are then advanced as a solution to these problems by certain authoritative subjects and institutions in ways that are taken as legitimate within each discursive formation. Originality/value Apart from offering a historical and discursive mapping of the different discursive formations from which mindfulness is pitched to teachers, this paper also highlights how each of these orientations impies a normative view of what a teacher should be. Suggestions for further historical research are also offered along the lines of genealogy, epistemology and ontology.

Beyond zero-sum thinking in teacher education: cognitive science, educational neuroscience, and the history of education

“…Low, 2019a, b), as well as an engagement with psychology and neuroscience in seeking ways beyond it (e.g. Low, 2019c, 2023), this is my preliminary attempt to respond to the latest attempt to resurrect the tired debate over “the art versus science of teaching”. I hope to do so in ways that invite historians of education to “add reality to scientific objects” rather than “always to be subtracting some bit from it” (Latour, 2004, p. 237).…”

Follow the breath: mindfulness as travelling pedagogy

“…While this was perhaps inevitable given the alien context into which it had been transposed – along with the conditions of acceptance or resistance it faced – nonetheless it is instructive to note how such contextual conditions were negotiated by the specific teacher. Under the institutional constraints of the UMMS and clinical research, as well as personal and familial pressures, Kabat-Zinn refashioned mindfulness by rendering it secular and standardised in the hopes of establishing its scientific respectability (Low, 2019).…”

“…According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2021), “significance” can denote the “meaning of a word, gesture, event, etc.”, and/or the “quality of being worthy of attention; importance, consequence.” This article on mindfulness is, in some respects, a follow-up to another that I have written in this journal that sought to historicise the recent surge of interest in mindfulness and education (Low, 2019). At the broadest level, both my previous article and this one are concerned with the significance of mindfulness.…”