Hi, welcome to the podcast from the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning at the University of Delaware.
I'm Rose Muravchick Assistant Director at CTAL and I'm joined today by Mike Mackenzie. Hi, Mike
Mike is the Assistant professor in
Behavioral Health and Nutrition and also the Director of the Mind-Body Behavior lab and he joined us to facilitate our most recent
Round table about Mindfulness Practices and incorporating mindfulness into the classroom. So let's start with the title as we often do
What does mindfulness mean for you?
And how do you define that in the work that you do?
So mindful for an us for us is really focused around paying attention in the present moment on purpose without a lot of extra
Chatter rods, you know, our minds can kind of wander off all sorts of different places
So we tend to steal that narrative a little bit terms of the work that we're doing on campus with faculty
we really help them in terms of facilitating their attention both in terms of
concentration and just really simple awareness in terms of what's going on with itself and in our environment. So we did a little icebreaker
exercise in the beginning to get people attune to this way of thinking
So, can you describe for our listeners how we started our whole session?
So the beauty of mindfulness is it's really something that you can apply to anything that you're engaged in and well the first thing that
we were doing is a collective was eating so there was an opportunity
it was an opportunity really to just sort of slow down the pace of
something that's oftentimes habitual that we don't think about
in terms of both the sensation of eating in terms of everything that's sort of occurring in terms of taste in terms of touch and
smell as well as just watching where the mind goes when you're engaged in this in this really simple behavior
whether it's thoughts of food that you've had that similar before or other things of that nature.
So a very simple awareness practice using something that we're doing routinely all the time. Yeah
It was a nice way to get us all kind of focused and into the practice of the whole topic of the roundtable topic
But also so straightforward you could do that at every meal
Basically the way you begin eating paying attention bringing yourself to that focus
So it's easy to replicate I think absolutely even if it's just a couple of bites.
Yeah, so our faculty were very interested in this topic. We had great attendance
which lets us know that people are interested in mindfulness practices, generally
but what are some of the benefits for faculty in incorporating mindfulness exercises into their classes?
So for our faculty, it's been a really interesting experience here on campus
we were originally approached just to do faculty development and to work with faculty around their own stresses and challenges in terms of
living in the academic world, as a function of that people were saying that this is really great
But we'd also like to see how we can bring this into the classroom. So we've run a couple of initiatives on campus
Where we're trying to work with faculty to do that. The other thing that we've just recently developed is a
one-credit program for undergraduates
where they can engage in mindfulness
practices throughout the course of this semester the benefit I think for both in terms of what we're hearing
Is that it over time It tends to create more clarity
Stress does become more
manageable and people are noticing that it's highlighting their their sort of sense of connection with other people that are both engaged in the program
and in terms of other interpersonal relationships. That's really important, especially this time of year
I mean we could see in all of our participants that May this time of the calendar was pretty rough for everybody
and so
Even though it seems like it's hard to take some of that time out. There's a real benefit for everybody to develop these
habits really it's kind of what you guys were talking about was small regular practices, right? Yeah
I mean, I think that's really well said so really just Kelly hona or concentration our general awareness and create some useful mental habits.
Yeah, but not everybody is always a hundred percent comfortable with these kinds of exercises
so we heard from some of our participants who had a lot of familiarity
So some folks who do yoga some people who do meditation who seemed pretty comfortable
but several of our participants described earnestly, you know how this might be challenging
So what are some of those frequent challenges or roadblocks maybe that people have in trying to adapt to a mindfulness practice?
I think the biggest challenge that we often hear both from people is that they're so busy
Where are they gonna fit in just one more thing?
So a lot of the work that we do on on campus is really creating practices that are doable
So generally rather than taking, you know one or two chunks out of the day to do practices
We're doing much smaller practices that people can intersperse throughout the day.
Yeah.
The other thing we find is that people certainly have preferences in terms of which of these sort of mindful practices are of benefit
to them, some people like a really active practice like a yoga practice.
Some people are more focused on stillness type practice,
Other people are really focused on interpersonal
relationships and the beauty of the work that we do is we can really work with people around what their interests and background are to
To do something that's a bit more prescriptive that they that they're more likely to have some success with in continuing.
Yeah. And our participants got a chance to try several of these different kinds of practices to get a sense of what's out there
But I also think that's a good way to model that for students
Also, they have the same challenges there might be different ways that are more effective for them to also bring more awareness.
So they got to practice some breathing exercises
we did some focus and concentration exercises.
What are some of the other areas that people focus on in these mindfulness practices?
So you've highlighted a number of areas. So we generally work from five different areas. So the
practices that are around creating some focus, practices that are just around
honing our basic attentional awareness capacities,
practices that are focused on on the body, so whether that's a breath or some other physical sensation,
practices that are geared towards
interpersonal awareness and Relations
and the fifth thing that we do is is really working around what's going on in your external environment that you might be able to
To calm down some what. The example that we talked a lot about was a cell phone usage, right?
Right, so we know that people are using their cells upwards of three and five hours a day
It's a lot of cognitive bandwidth to be to be
directing that way and we find that if we can help people to to limit some of those
stimuli that can be really, really helpful. And it's one that's a great example of something where if you as a faculty member
Concentrate on developing that awareness yourself it's easier for you to help your students understand
the importance of that we get a lot of questions from faculty about technology use in the classroom
And this is an interesting way to frame that for students to say, you know
there are challenges you will face in the rest of your kind of attention span focus and concentration
because of as you said this bandwidth being taken up by other distractors may be.
Absolutely. This is certainly one of those opportunities to do as I do
yeah, and in working with our faculty, we see that at the end of the
Our time together whether it's a six-week program or whatever we're doing. They're often much more aware of how they are engaged in the classroom
let alone some of these practices that they can they can share with students.
So it's it's an interesting learning curve. Yeah
Well, we had a great experience with practicing what we were preaching what you are doing research about
I think this will probably be a regular feature in the month of May given how stressed everybody is then
And I hope that our participants got a chance to learn about some things
Maybe they weren't familiar with and get us an opportunity to practice so that hopefully in the fall
they can approach all of the tasks they have for that semester with a little more clarity and focus
So thank you for joining us. You're very welcome. And we really look forward to having more of these initiatives and programs on campus
so this is a great opportunity Thanks. So our programming for the round tables is done for this year
It's CTAL
But we will be back with more events more round tables and more workshops
starting in August and if you need any more information about other seat all programs as well as the other roundtables for this year and
Podcasts you can visit our website at seat all you CTAL@udel.edu. Thanks,. Thanks Mike. You're very welcome to
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét