This paper opens with a family anecdote in which my future mother in-law, when asked what wise advice she would offer undergraduate university students, replied, "I would tell them it's not going to be okay." Can we learn to keep engaging with the world despite its inevitable disappointments? I propose that Stoic philosophy, by…

Educational leaders are required to respond in real time to questions, quandaries, and cases that involve individuals in different contexts. They face an array of possible choices that exist in tension. Justice and fairness must coexist with mercy and compassion; in enforcing policy, compliance must make room for flexibility in special cases.…

Although interest in contemplative pedagogies has grown considerably in higher education, faculty have relatively few resources available to help them make evidence-based choices about the use of different contemplative pedagogies in particular disciplinary or course contexts. We propose adapting a framework from the Scholarship of Teaching and…

Mindfulness, or present-moment awareness, and its associated qualities of calm/relaxation, nonjudgment, intentionality, concentration, and compassion, are increasingly being used to help cultivate self-awareness, attention, and optimal learning experiences. After defining mindfulness and selecting key concepts, we apply the construct and features…

This article is about a pedagogical movement I discern in Quentin Meillassoux's ontology. The goal of the essay is to introduce his approach to reality in outline form and offer it as a possible route to conceptualize education as the practice of keeping the bodymind attentive and agile against its unsound ossification by way of providing a…

We address the nature of mindfulness and its salience to education generally and to science education specifically. In a context of the historical embeddedness of mindfulness in Buddhism we discuss research in social neuroscience, presenting evidence for neuronal plasticity of the brain and six emotional styles, which are not biologically…

New scholarship advocates that students should learn deeply and well. Little information exists on exactly how to get students deeply into material so that they understand it inside and out, backward and forward and in a way that enables them to construct knowledge schemas. The authors have developed a heuristic list of communication response…

Transformation involves rethinking values and ways of seeing and acting, particularly as time stress compounds legacies of oppression and systematic underdevelopment in many postcolonial countries. These are exacerbated by structural challenges, as many societies are undergoing national, democratic, urban, race, class and gender revolutions…

Because wisdom is such a complex and multidimensional construct, it is difficult to study, much less to define. Based on the author's understanding, her definition of wisdom is as follows: "Wisdom is about human flourishing; it is having sufficient awareness in various situations and contexts to act in ways that enhance our common humanity." This…

In the context of the home culture, culturally relevant pedagogy aims to make young people "reflect hard on their choices about work and politics, and encourage them to become sensitive to issues of inequality and suffering, and social justice." That is, this pedagogy works to instill a critical consciousness in the students, one where they can…

The goals of this article are to elucidate trends and perspectives in the field of cognitive style research and to propose an integrated framework to guide future research. This is accomplished by means of a comprehensive literature review of the major advances and the theoretical and experimental problems that have accumulated over the years and…

In "Speaking of Faith," radio journalist Krista Tippett recalls the time when she began to recognize the hypocrisy and contradictions in the behavior of the people around her. Tippett's experience is not only far from unusual, it is formative. It led her to make some important decisions in her life, including the desire never to live a life of…

Sustaining and strengthening tribal cultures, languages and traditions is at the core of every tribal college's mission statement. To help attain these goals, many colleges use one of Indian Country's greatest assets--its elders. Traditionally, elders hold a place of honor in American Indian society. Without cultural input from elders,…

Conventional assessments do not meet the cognitive demands of the world today. WICS, an acronym for wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized, can provide a more meaningful model. Findings from the Rainbow Project, conducted by the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, showed that assessing students for…

This paper describes the problem-solving behaviors of 12 mathematicians as they completed four mathematical tasks. The emergent problem-solving framework draws on the large body of research, as grounded by and modified in response to our close observations of these mathematicians. The resulting "Multidimensional Problem-Solving Framework" has four…