Description
Book SynopsisThe Mindful Classroom: Constructive Conversations on Race, Identity, and Social Justice helps teachers and discussion facilitators practice and teach mindfulness and movement techniques that can deeply enhance conversations about race, identity, and social justice, furthering social justice efforts at their most basic stage—person to person—from the face-to-face or online classroom to the community at large. Mindfulness and movement practices can help us prepare for and engage in difficult conversations, and the more conscious we become of our emotional, mental, and physical landscape, the more we are able to engage proactively rather than reactively, consciously rather than automatically. We become able to act (or not act), rather than react in situations with others. The topics of race and social justice are timely, and they are triggers. Productive engagement with these topics demands we remain mindful of how we may be triggered and how we may be triggering others; it demands we pay attention to ourselves at a fundamental level, and it demands that we grant such attention to others.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Preface: Why Be Mindful?
Introduction: Where have we been? Where are we now? Tracing civil (and uncivil) discourse
Chapter 1: What we talk about when we talk about race: encountering individual identity, personal agency, and collective struggle
Mindfulness & Movement Practice 1
Chapter 2: How Will We Be? Creating Constructive Conversations and Communities
Mindfulness & Movement Practice 2
Chapter 3: From Page to Presence: Using Literary Studies to Engage the World
Mindfulness & Movement Practice 3
Chapter 4: Engaging Community
Mindfulness & Movement Practice 4
Chapter 5: The Mindful Classroom: Seeing and Freeing the Whole Student
Chapter 6: Student Voices: Reflections from Mindfully Engaged Students
Conclusion: Where are we going? Communities to Come
Afterword: From Conversation to Commitment by Andrew Woods
Appendices:
Resources
Bibliography
Notes
About the Author
