Drawing from mindfulness education and social justice teaching, this book explores an anti-oppressive pedagogy for university and college classrooms. Authentic classroom discussions about oppression and diversity can be difficult; a mindful approach allows students to explore their experiences with compassion and to engage in critical inquiry to confront their deeply held beliefs and value systems. This engaging book is full of practical tips for deepening learning, addressing challenging situations, and providing mindfulness practices in anti-oppression classrooms. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy is for all higher education professionals interested in pedagogy that empowers and engages students in the complex unlearning of oppression.

This volume explores mindfulness and other contemplative approaches as strategic tools for cultivating anti-oppressive pedagogies in higher education. Research confirms that simply providing students with evidence and narratives of economic, social, and environmental injustices proves insufficient in developing awareness and eliciting responses of empathy, solidarity, and a desire to act for change. From the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, legal studies, psychology, and counseling, educators from a range of geographical and disciplinary standpoints describe their research-based mindfulness pedagogies. Chapters explore how to interrupt and interrogate oppression through contemplative teaching tools, assignments, and strategies that create greater awareness and facilitate deeper engagement with learning contents, contexts, and communities. Providing a framework that facilitates awareness of the links between historic and current oppression, self-identity, and trauma, and creating a transformative learning experience through mindfulness, this book is a must-read for faculty and educators interested in intersections of mindfulness, contemplative pedagogies, and anti-oppression.

Radiating Feminism: Resilience Practices to Transform Our Inner and Outer Lives is a practical guide to embodying feminist principles not just in our politics, but also in our very ways of being. Bringing together intersectional feminism with mindful reflection and embodied practice, this book offers practical wisdom for living by feminist principles in our daily lives. Each chapter includes practices and interactive activities to help navigate common challenges along feminist journeys. The book also draws on wisdom from feminist leaders and contemporary conversations from social justice movements. Both inspiring and guiding, the book will provide readers with the skills to cultivate resilience to face the many barriers to feminist social transformation. Radiating Feminism will be of use to students of Gender Studies, Social Work, Psychology, Community Health, and the Social Sciences, as well as anyone with a longstanding or fresh commitment to feminism and social justice.

Grounded in critical race feminism, this book explores mindfulness as an empowering approach in multicultural education. The author explores how learners of multicultural education—by (re)centering the body through mindfulness with concrete strategies and scaffolded practice—can be empowered to handle the activated emotions and deep self-inquiry that come with the work of social justice, liberation, and anti-racism. This book includes counter stories of students of colors and offers both an epistemological and a curricular approach to mindfulness in multicultural education, including discussion of theory and key principles in addition to ten modules with practices to engage learners. These modules can be directly applied as the basis for curricular changes in teacher education and university-wide social justice courses, or they can be independently read by learners interested in enhancing their wellbeing and social justice. Written for teacher preparation and university social justice courses, this book encourages educators to contextualize their mindfulness practice within a critique of systems of oppression and ask questions about how mindfulness can empower action towards a more just society.

Contemplative pedagogy is a way for instructors to: empower students to integrate their own experience into the theoretical material they are being taught in order to deepen their understanding; help students to develop sophisticated problem-solving skills; support students’ sense of connection to and compassion for others; and engender inquiries into students’ most profound questions. Contemplative practices are used in just about every discipline—from physics to economics to history—and are found in every type of institution. Each year more and more faculty, education reformers, and leaders of teaching and learning centers seek out best practices in contemplative teaching, and now can find them here, brought to you by two of the foremost leaders and innovators on the subject. This book presents background information and ideas for the practical application of contemplative practices across the academic curriculum from the physical sciences to the humanities and arts. Examples of contemplative techniques included in the book are mindfulness, meditation, yoga, deep listening, contemplative reading and writing, and pilgrimage, including site visits and field trips.

Spirituality and Social Justice explores how critically informed spirituality can serve as an inspiration and a political force in the quest for social and ecological justice. Writing from various spiritual and religious worldviews, including Indigenous, Islamic, Wicca/Witchcraft, Jewish, Buddhist, and Christian, the authors—practitioners and academics of social work—draw on lived experience, research, and literature to illuminate how relationship with spirit can orient ways of being and acting to build a more just society. In Part One, the authors foreground Indigenous spirituality as resistance and decolonization. Part Two examines the complex ethical and political dimensions of spirituality, including the ecological destruction of the Earth and the influence of contemporary neoliberalism. Lastly, Part Three explores spirituality in teaching and learning contexts, both inside and beyond the classroom. Engaging and well-written, Spirituality and Social Justice challenges the notion that practitioners must put aside their critical spirituality in teaching, learning, healing, and practice. Students, practitioners, and academics of social work and other helping professions will benefit from the unique insights into spirituality and religion and how they inform social justice activism.

This book weaves together critical components of student development and community building for social justice to prepare students to engage effectively in community-campus partnerships for social change. The author combines diverse theoretical models such as critical pedagogy, asset-based community development, and healing justice with lessons from programs promoting indigenous knowledge, decolonization, and mindfulness. Most importantly, this book links theory to practice, offering service-learning classroom activities, course and community partnership criteria, learning outcomes, and assessment rubrics. It speaks to students, faculty, administrators, and community members who are interested in utilizing community engagement as a vehicle for the development of students and communities towards wellbeing and social justice.