This article reports on results from a narrative inquiry into the experiences of four students who completed an elective yoga course as part of their high school program in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to understand the participants' stories of their yoga experiences. Overall, students were able to express and give examples of how yoga made them feel stronger, happier, kinder, and more self-confident. We suggest that Yoga 11 is a mindfulness curriculum, inherently. This research might be of particular interest to others similarly engaged in research related to mental health and mindfulness in education.
Inclusive education in Alberta is entangled in a long, dark history of exclusion. Hermeneutics can help illuminate and interrupt this entanglement in order to ask what might be taken for granted within it. Our notions of inclusion could be interpreted as suffering from an inability to recognize what is still historically at play, especially in the case of students diagnosed with emotional and behavioural disabilities. Seeing and understanding this through a hermeneutic sense of historical inquiry and play can help us move towards socially just school systems for children and youth.
This paper is a collection of small, formal and informal writings and is part of the early groundwork we have been doing together on the topic of the pedagogy of suffering, a phrase that has certainly given pause to many colleagues we have spoken to. We are trying to understand and articulate how and why suffering can be pedagogical in character and how it is often key to authentic and meaningful acts of teaching and learning. We are exploring threads from both the hermeneutic tradition and from Buddhism, in order to decode our understandable rush to ameliorate suffering at every turn and to consider every instance of it as an error to be avoided at all costs. We also look to these traditions to begin to formulate how a pedagogy that turns away from suffering suffers a great loss, and how a pedagogy that turns towards suffering can become a locale of great teaching and learning, great wisdom and grace.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.