Presentation by: Dr. Thomas Culham, Dr. Neha Shivhare
Session: C | Time: 10:05AM – 10:45AM | Location: Room 202
Craig (2011) on the basis of his research involving 2600 students in 130 courses taught by a cohort of 158 fellows reported that the majority of fellows responded that contemplative practices facilitate a more positive classroom environment than that of the courses without them, and nearly 80% of the fellows found that students appreciated the courses incorporating contemplative practices and found these to have transformative impact on them. Craig (2011) further reported that contemplative practices based pedagogy made classroom learning experience more effective and positively influenced students’ personal lives. Moreover, it has been found empirically also that even short periods of contemplative practices improve cognitive flexibility leading to better and increased attention span.
Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush (2014) in their book Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning, have outlined a number of personal and social benefits of incorporating contemplative practices in teaching and learning.
Keeping in view the immense transformative potential of contemplative practices, and with an aim to further investigate their scaffolding efficacies for educational purposes, the present research was conducted. For the research purpose, Virtue Ethics course was developed which incorporated the pedagogical strategies based on contemplative practices.
A quasi experimental approach was adopted for this study involving quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. The intervention was a business ethics undergrad course having two major themes: (i) development character virtues through contemplative practices enhancing self-knowledge and personal transformation, and (ii) development of intellectual virtues through exposure to information regarding psychological, social and business contexts within which ethics decisions are made. This course was conducted over a twelve-week period in 2016 involving 93 students in two sections of a 3rd year business ethics course taught at a University in Western Canada. The present paper elaborates the research design and reports the findings of contemplative practices based intervention.
Abstract: 607