Policy documents from OECD and UNESCO have been stressing the need to prepare students for what has been termed a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. They emphasise socialemotional competencies as necessary for coping with such conditions. This qualitative research frames the COVID-19 outbreak as an extreme case of VUCA that grants the opportunity to examine whether our teacher preparation curriculum provides teacher students with these social-emotional competencies that they are expected to model and are necessary for coping with such circumstances. Fifty-four student teachers and 24 teacher educators responded to open-ended questionnaires, and 16 semi-structured interviews with teacher educators were analysed based on grounded theory. Results demonstrate that our student teachers struggle substantially with VUCA circumstances and do not seem to receive sufficient preparation in the domain of social-emotional competencies. These troubling findings serve as a wake-up call to increase a social-emotional orientation in teacher education curriculum.

Since the turn of the millennium there has been a clear rise in the implementation and research of mindfulness across primary, secondary and postsecondary education. These implementations, however, hardly constitute a uniform phenomenon. They reflect a variety of framings, modalities and educational aims, as documented in hundreds of peer‐reviewed papers. To date no overarching review has provided an empirically based mapping of this multifaceted and rapidly developing discourse. This paper offers a first‐of‐its‐kind map of mindfulness in education stemming from the 447 peer‐reviewed papers published between 2002 and 2017 that constitute this academic discourse, and based on grounded theory methodology. The research reveals an exponential rise in the amount of publications over years, with a complex discourse that evolves from seven different framings of the practice, applied to nine different educational domains and based on various types of implementation. It maps this complex discourse and describes its two main patterns to date as they emerged from the research: (1) Mindfulness in education, which comprises mostly of outsourced, secularised interventions aimed at improved mental–physical health, social–emotional learning and cognitive functions, (2) Mindfulness as education, which is a less common yet more transformative strand and manifests in contemplative pedagogy in higher education and in some rare whole‐school implementations. Overall, in the studied period mindfulness has been moving from near‐anonymity towards the mainstream; however, this discourse reflects a nascent phase given that it is only beginning to critique itself. Furthermore, its two patterns reflect a split discourse that is challenged by the practice's psychological–secular framing and its Buddhist framing.

Mindfulness In, As and Of Education: Three Roles of Mindfulness in Education OREN ERGASFollowing the exponential rise in publications on mindfulness in education and the emergence of some critical perspectives on this field, this paper articulates three roles of mindfulness practice in education: Mindfulness in, as and of education. The three are developed based on an examination of the practice as it is shaped by two different socio-historical narratives, which in turn manifest in different modalities of implementation and aims in the contemporary educational field. While much of the field is governed by 'mindfulness in education' within economic-therapeutic interventions, equal attention is given to 'mindfulness as education' as reflected in a whole school approach and to 'mindfulness of education' in which the practice radicalises the ethos of critical pedagogy. Describing these three roles, the paper introduces readers to the practice itself, offers a framework for understanding its associations with a variety of educational aims, and critically discusses these associations as well as the diverse pedagogical possibilities that this practice brings to contemporary and future education.

No abstract

No abstract