Integrating contemplative pedagogy and anti-oppressive pedagogy in geography higher education classrooms

ABSTRACT

Geographers have long advocated for decolonizing geographic research and curriculum to produce forms of anti-oppressive knowledge and learning. While these calls have become more prominent in recent years, these conversations are rarely translated into a reflection on pedagogy and how we integrate anti-oppressive teaching in the classroom. This paper argues that introducing contemplative pedagogy into our classrooms presents one step toward teaching and producing anti-oppressive geographic knowledge. Anti-oppressive teaching and learning requires challenging oppressive forms of knowledge and asks that students and instructors develop self-reflexivity, reflect on their privilege, and learn to see the world through the experiences of others. Contemplative pedagogy helps both students and instructors engage more deeply with these challenging tasks by equipping students to reflect on their own experiences and positionalities and integrate contradictory and challenging viewpoints. I argue that by incorporating contemplative pedagogy and mindfulness into geography classrooms, both instructors and students will have a set of tools with which to transform the learning experience and provide students with the skills to productively engage in these difficult, but necessary, conversations around issues of privilege, colonialism, injustice, racism, and inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Contemplative pedagogy
• mindfulness
• anti-oppressive pedagogy
• geography
• higher education

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Erin Galyen and Garry Forger for their encouragement and feedback on earlier iterations of this paper which was written in their Mindful Teaching and Learning seminar. I also appreciate the insightful comments provided by Eden Kinkaid, as well as the anonymous reviewers on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In scholarship on contemplative practices and mindfulness, these terms are often used interchangeably.

2. Some geographers have advocated for bridging mindfulness and geographic scholarship; however, this literature attends to issues of epistemology and methodology (Whitehead et al., 2016) and not pedagogy.

3. Reflexivity broadly signals a commitment to accounting for how our experiences and positionality inform our research, teaching, interpretations, and other engagements or activities (see England, 1994; Rose, 1997).

4. See the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society for an overview of contemplative practices used in academic settings: http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree

5. Other examples can be found in Berila (2015) and Rendón and Kanagala (2017). See also Koopman and Seliga (2021) for a discussion of nonviolent communication and difficult dialogue in college classrooms.