爆料社区

About Us

Our Story

 The Mindful 爆料社区 story begins in 2013 when one founding member, Dr. Fritz Kreisler, a trained Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) instructor and faculty member from Student Health and Counseling Services (SHCS), offered an MBSR course for the campus community. That summer, three other founding members, Dr Jennifer Jeffries, Dr. Marie Thomas and Dr. Ranjeeta Basu attended a summer program offered by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind) located in Florence, Massachusetts. This week-long residential workshop focused on the incorporation of mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy into teaching. These practices include but are not limited to breath practices, body scan, mindful reading, listening and writing and loving kindness practices to name a few. It was a life-changing experience; the three of us returned to campus convinced that contemplative practices could help create a learning environment where we felt a deep sense of connectedness to ourselves, to our students, to each other, and to the larger regional and global community. In short, we returned with a commitment to create a contemplative community on our campus.  Not only did we begin integrating contemplative practices into our own courses but all four of us also began offering workshops to students, faculty, staff, and administrators on contemplative practices. The response was overwhelming. Our sessions were always full, and the feedback provided evidence that people on our campus and those at neighboring community colleges saw the value of these practices.

         In the next two years we offered two Faculty Learning Communities (FLCs) funded by the Faculty Center around the theme of integrating contemplative pedagogy into the classroom. The FLCs helped us to lay the foundation for community with our students through the pedagogical approaches we learned about, practiced together, and ultimately brought into our classrooms. Students from a wide variety of disciplines have been exposed to this innovative pedagogy because members of the FLCs came from departments across the University.  Contemplative pedagogies have now been used on our campus (and, in many cases, continue to be used) in courses as diverse as computer science, social work, psychology, kinesiology, sociology, education, linguistics, economics, business management, global studies, child development, human development, nursing, dance, music, software engineering and communication with both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to the classroom, contemplative practices are also being used across the campus from student health and counseling and student leadership services to staff professional development in finance and administrative services and housing. These practices include stress reduction practices, mindful communication and compassion practices, focused attention practices to name a few.

         The desire to create a contemplative and compassionate community among faculty, staff and students allowed us to make the transition from individual practice to a communal one. In 2017 we established the Mindful 爆料社区 initiative under the auspices of the Office of Inclusive Excellence. Mindfulness practices can foster the ability to: communicate with compassion, listen to each other even when it is painful to do so, and allow us to speak our truth without fear. Using mindfulness practices, our contemplative and compassionate community provided spaces where we as a campus were able to talk about issues such as sexual harassment, racial tension, elections, mass shootings, and the COVID pandemic. Over the next three semesters we worked with several Senior Experience teams from the College of Business Administration to develop a mission and vision statement, a five-year plan and a website and outreach plan. These teams also helped us develop our logo. To sum up, our goal is to provide support to all members of the campus community through contemplative practices, pedagogy, and research that foster deep learning, reduced stress, increased capacity for compassionate listening, and increased well-being.