CONTEXT
My research interests lie in integrating mindfulness and/or meditation into teaching to enhance mental health as a potential tool for social justice in the context of my role as a lecturer teaching fashion design and technology at LCF.
As a white, female academic educated in the UK’s grammar school system and now a lecturer at the London College of Fashion, my background and experiences absolutely shape my approach. Recognising my privilege as a white European. My goal is to de-centre my white Christian upbringing in my teaching and engage with diverse religious perspectives to foster inclusivity. My education, particularly the omission of Britain’s colonial history, has made me aware of gaps in my knowledge. I actively work to overcome this by learning from the experiences of others, acknowledging and addressing structural racism and understanding race as a social construct that influences privilege and opportunity. I advocate for a supportive and inclusive approach, also recognising how societal structures can disable individuals rather than any health conditions. I see this intervention as intersectional and as having the potential to create positive social structures.
‘For my Black body to be born into a society by which the white body is the standard is, in and of itself, traumatizing. If my mom is born as a Black woman, into a society that predicates her body as deviant, the amount of cortisol that is in her nervous system when I’m being born is teaching my nervous system something. Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma in a people looks like culture.’ (Menakem, in Tippett, 2021)
‘Increased experiences of ableist microaggressions are negatively correlated with positive mental health outcomes, and that the visibility of disabilities/impairments are correlated with experiencing ableist microaggressions’ (Kattari, 2020)
‘Intersectional subordination need not be intentionally produced; in fact, it is frequently the consequence of the imposition of one burden that interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to create yet another dimension of disempowerment’ (Crenshaw 1991 p1249) For this reason my intervention addresses the mental effect of intersectional discrimination, and if the practice of meditation is sustained and deepened it also has the potential to address the discriminator themselves.
My interest is rooted in my seven-year mindfulness practice and training under Julian Daizan Skinner and Hogets Baerndal at Imperial College in Zen. I have personally seen the positive impacts of mindfulness on mental health, in the course of my training and in the retreat that I ran this year.
I also see that my whiteness and ‘secular’ approach may cause blind spots in how my intervention is accessed and received. By which I mean that my training is in mindfulness meditation specifically for health and wellbeing, Although the lineage 1 of my teachers is clearly traceable back to 16th Century Japanese Buddhism and even further back to China. It is worth acknowledging that the methodology and ideas I teach have been ‘westernised’ for me primarily via Daizan, a white British man who spent over 14 years in a Japanese monastery and John Kabat-Zinn the white American Professor.
Kabatt-zinn says, “I bent over backwards to structure it and find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, new age, eastern mysticism or just plain flakey,” (Booth, Guardian, 2017)
Kabatt-Zinn’s ‘structuring’ is part of what drew me to mindfulness as I was encouraged by the scientific evidence for it. I must acknowledge my biases and the potential impact of my positionality on my research. I continuously reflect on my assumptions and strive to listen to and validate the experiences of marginalised individuals. Religion can guide people through their lives, give hope, and a sense of peace and community. It is therefore especially unfortunate that it is common for people to experience prejudice and discrimination often based on generalisations of religion. In my practice I also reject, assumptions that ‘people have ‘fixed, intrinsic, single, unified, relatively simple, or wholly prescribed identities’. And embrace agency and, ‘notions of identity fluidity and multiplicity’. (P17 Brown, 21) Essentially I believe that everything changes, and everything has the potential to change.
The full document PEER FEEDBACK Received before the intervention took place can be found at this link: GROUP MEETING Transcript.
EXERPTS FROM GROUP MEETING, PEER FEEDBACK
Jordan Hodgson
Have some time aside digitally or in an analogue capacity. Meet before and have that with students that elect to do that and then start the session. Have you considered that?
0:16:37.720 –> 0:16:51.160
Jordan Hodgson
Resource. But there’s also student services and how that works in conjunction with that. One thing we often deal with is a lot of trauma with the COVID generation now of like students coming through on that MA that kind of had really mixed experiences during the kind of COVID period.
Jordan Hodgson
And people stopped necessarily talking or in the cicrles that I work with stopped talking about it. But obviously it is having an impact. So yeah. How do, how do we yeah, engage with this for that? I guess also, like, how does this work with reverse services that UL already supports or provides and you kind of acknowledge the mindfulness.
Joao Maraschin
One thing that like I kept thinking about it and correct me if I’m wrong, but you might have kind of entertained that in the beginning and wondering how you could intersect, perhaps with fashion practice with what they’re actually learning and something like that.
0:17:11.310 –> 0:17:22.230
Joao Maraschin
Maybe like one of the USP like the the the sort of the way you can sell to to them which is also differentiate from perhaps the one happening at UAL already?
Joao Maraschin
Design fundamental tools that you could kind of like grasp into, and some sessions could be populated with that. So for instance you could use drawing as a technique as a way of supporting mindfulness and being present in in that moment and engaging with different materials, feelings, different materials.
0:18:8.880 –> 0:18:9.240
That could somehow kind of create a level of of interest in fashion students essentially, so they would not see just as a meditation at workshop, but something that could perhaps also help them engage with their practise in a different level.
0:18:14.210 –> 0:18:23.10
Emma Hamshare
Yeah. So I’ve taught mindful drawing sessions, which is kind of, yeah, the drawing becomes the meditation.
0:18:24.510 –> 0:18:33.110
Emma Hamshare
Maybe that is the way to differentiate it from the existing mindfulness classes that are there.
RESPONSE TO PGCERT PEER FEEDBACK ON INTERVENTION IDEA: Before the intervention
Jordan’s first point was really valuable feedback and I acted on this in the way I decided to run the intervention session. To hold the session just before the class (or in our case staff meeting) and make it clear that it is optional and people didn’t need to attend. Mindfulness must always be an opt-in, it cannot be something that is forced upon anyone for several reasons, including that it can expose underlying trauma or pain that someone may not be ready to deal with, and that people with conditions similar to schizophrenia should speak to their doctors before practicing.
Joao’s point is very useful and I think that meditation and mindful ways of doing can be utilised in many ways, I have used this in drawing and draping sessions and the main advantage here is to focus on the clearing of expectations and enable students to allow themselves to be more open to alternative creative outcomes rather than the (often creatively stifling) preconceived notions of the garment they expect themselves to produce. Often students, like most of us, have been more exposed to high street fashion rather than high-end or experimental outcomes that could students to access more authentic creativity and also differentiate themselves from the market. So this was a great prompt for thinking about future interventions and application to my subject matter.
Sometimes to add another time commitment to an already packed curriculum and schedule of students and staff is not desirable. Attendance is already an issue with my students as they commonly start the term well and attendance drops off towards the end as they concentrate on making their garments. I ran an optional ‘Mindful Drawing’ session one afternoon early last term, offered to at least 300 students, of whom around 7 signed up and only 1 attended, so that session did not take place. Students are also suffering from digital overwhelm being sent constant emails and notifications from all sides, so information that is not perceived as critical to them creating their work is often ignored. I know that mindfulness is an incredibly valuable use of time so I need to consider how I can communicate the benefits, knowing that people will come to it in their own time and it is of no advantage to push those that don’t want to or can’t take part until/if they are ready. This is one of many reasons I chose to run this particular intervention for staff rather than students as I discussed with participant 5.
Considering links with existing services at UAL as mentioned by Jordan is also very important, We have an existing weekly lunchtime 25 minute meditation available to all. – I would like to collaborate and speak to the chaplains and can also signpost this further in my teaching. https://artschaplaincy.net/meditation/ – I have now added this link to my email signature alongside the mental health link. Although I am trained in how to apply mindfulness to mental health, I am of course not a mental health practitioner so it is vital to signpost and make referrals to student services where needed. The existence of this also means that my intervention is sustainable in the longer term in a way that does not require my presence.
Jordan’s point about Covid is about is fundamental. Every student group to come for the next 15 or so years will have experienced the pandemic and been affected by it in and inequality widened nationally during the pandemic. Mindfulness certainly helped me through it as this as my meditation teacher training took place over the course of 2020-2022. Jordan offered for me to come and teach mindfulness to his students which is really positive and speaks to the sustainability of the intervention as having applications beyond my own program, although the schedules didn’t quite line up, I endeavour to follow up later on.
A detailed account of my intervention can be found at this link:
MEDITATION STAFF INTERVENTION 9th JULY 2024
REFLECTION:
It is a particular quirk of this intervention that marginalised people who may benefit from it, may also be the least likely people to join, or feel welcome. Those who might most benefit from the meditation could feel unwelcome in the space with the class run by me. When it comes to mental health interventions external to education, ‘Treatment receipt was lower for all ethnic minority groups compared with the White British group, and lowest among Black people, for whom inequalities appear to be widening over time’ (Ahmad, G. et al. 2022) And in relation to seeking help, ‘There is also a more generalized community public intervention, the product of a desire to create a private from the diverse assaults on the public lives of racially subordinated people.’ Wanting to deal with problems in the community, in the family rather than outside it. (Crenshaw p18)
I am aware that any attempt I make to ‘help’ others may not resonate with marginalised people and I feel further work is required for me to reach out, but also where possible it is best to decentre myself, as teachers of colour may be better placed to resonate. ‘Critical pedagogy centers a theory of resistance, to explain why disenfranchised groups often do not succeed in traditional educational systems that marginalize them. This resistance also opens the possibility for an oppositional consciousness, in which students actively resist their dehumanization and develop counter-hegemonic alternatives that center marginalized people. (Berila 2015)
RESPONSE TO FEEDBACK FROM PARTICIPANTS & REFLECTION After the intervention:
Participants feedback and images can be found at this link: FEEDBACK
I have anonymised the participants feedback here as I did not ask specifically gain permission to publish their feedback. However, to me the participants are my colleagues and not anonymous as I have working relationships with them all.
Participants 1, 3 and 4 all would have preferred a closed room rather than our fashion workshop space, which has two walls but is interlinked with adjoining rooms. This is a known problem at East Bank in our classes as well as for my session. Participant 3 mentioned that particularly for ‘students who have ADHD’ it would be challenging in this environment too.
I felt that Mindfulness Meditation would be ideal for those with ADHD, even though they may find it more difficult or challenging and certainly a quiet environment would help. After an 8 week course similar to the one I teach, ‘Improvements in self-reported ADHD symptoms and test performance on tasks measuring attention and cognitive inhibition were noted. Improvements in anxiety and depressive symptoms were also observed. (Zylowska et al., 2008)
Participant 1 who I know had some experience, said,
‘Giving more context at the start of the session would be useful (especially for student facing), why following our breath, slowing down and being calm is important to us on different levels.’ (Participant 1, 2024)
My meditation teacher’s response to this would be, ‘A picture of a rice cake doesn’t satisfy hunger’. Meaning it is better to do something than to talk about doing it. However I certainly agree that a little more of an introduction before the meditation begins, especially when working with people for the first time, would help them to understand how they should approach this, being in the present, non-judgementally, on purpose with compassion.
I was thinking it would be nice to see staff/students using these techniques to keep them focused/ staying calm and seeing meditation as something that can be part of everyday and done at a time that is right for you”(Participant 1, 2024)
This is exactly the goal, however for me to be able to practise independently took years, so I know how valuable and necessary guidance is, especially in the beginning of creating a long term practice. Although meditation is simple, it is not easy. Some people feel meditation is something they can do for free and pick up quickly, and although I agree that it should be free to take part in, this can sometimes mean that people are undervaluing the commitment needed. I think this point also touches on the difference between mediation and mindfulness and is something I can certainly further explore in my teaching in addition to the mindful drawing classes I have already run.
Participant 3’s idea of ‘getting people to be aware of their bodies,‘ in the context of wearing clothing’. is great, and taps into Mindful drawing sessions I have run before that involve drawing with your eyes closed using touch. I have also designed ‘Material Mediation’ sessions too and this feedback serves as a great reminder that I can utilise mindfulness in class in this way.
Participants 1 & 3 Both said that this could be a useful tool for students around their deadlines, hand-in or submission. And I too think that this would be a good time for it, however, it is a fantastic dichotomy of mindfulness and relaxation techniques, that the times when you most need it are also the times when you are least likely to practice. I think perhaps before a ‘making the grade’ session run online, it could work although I think it unlikely that students would attend close to their deadline seeing as we struggle to even get them to attend their actual tutorials around then.
In response to participant 4. I don’t think it appropriate for a student to run the session, It should not be practiced by someone who is not trained as a meditation teacher as we have a duty of care and responsibility. The teacher training prepares you to deal with some mental health concerns, and the questions that people often have after meditating, and it is required that you have a practice yourself so that you teach from experience. I am part of a network of well-trained meditation teachers though any of them could certainly have delivered a very similar session to the body scan one I did.
Participant 5 and I had a long conversation and I could tell they were excited by the possibility for positive change that meditation offers especially for staff in our institution as this would set the tone for students experience.
I think their comments on ‘clearing stereotypes, debunking myths and removing expectations‘ have many layers. Initially relating to participant 1’s feedback about more of a talk before the meditation starts. However also what is seen is that meditation can offer the kind of introspection needed to change a person’s belief systems, core thinking, and prejudices. I think I need to research further into how mediation can be applied successfully in this way. As a starting point likely using Thich Nahn Hanh’s idea of ‘interconnectedness’ which means we are all connected and if something hurts one of us it hurts all of us. ‘With an integration of antiracism and critical pedagogy, mindfulness educators can ensure that mindfulness is utilized as a practice of freedom (inspired by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire) rather than a technology of compliance.’ (Cannon, 2016)
A longer term practice involves being able to listen’ to the body. You may meditate to ‘get out of your thinking mind’ and into the body, perhaps noticing things you have neglected such as being hungry, thirsty or tired or stiff in one body part that needs to move or stretch. I have found it particularly helpful when in pain, as having control over where you can place your attention in the body can be incredibly powerful. In education, ‘We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name,’ (Haraway 582)
Although these gains are hard won through much practice and trial and there is no guarantee anyone will experience the same thing. However there is a large body of academic evidence that meditation can have a positive effect on pain. eg. (Zeidan, F et al 2016) And although I may follow the same exact guidance each time, each mediation feels completely different for me. And of course the way someone else feels depends on how their day, week or month is going and in fact their entire life experience up until that moment. One of the best things about teaching meditation is that the goal is to simply gain some distance from your own thoughts, thereby giving you the space to question them. Emotional wisdom, I believe is a tool that can be used in teaching for connecting with your body and breath, dealing with life’s undulations, and noticing the interconnectedness of life and materials on this planet. And this tool can also be used to address some of the harmful mental effects of stress and caused by intersectional experiences of discrimination. (Robertson P18)
Thank you.
1 – Lineage: Julian Daizan Skinner; the first Englishman to go to Japan and become a Roshi or Zen Master in the rigorous Rinzai tradition of Zen. In 2003, Daizan began training with Rinzai Zen Master Shinzan Miyamae Rōshi of Gyokuryuji Temple in Gifu, central Japan. The temple was the former hermitage of the outstanding Rinzai Zen reformer Bankei Yōtaku Zenji (1622–1693). Shinzan Rōshi, something of a maverick in the modern Zen world, intended the tiny temple to provide a basis of true Zen training’. (Scaramanga, 2019)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad, G. et al. (2022) ‘Prevalence of common mental disorders and treatment receipt for people from ethnic minority backgrounds in England: repeated cross-sectional surveys of the general population in 2007 and 2014’, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 221(3), pp. 520–527. doi:10.1192/bjp.2021.179.
Berila, B. (2015). Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy. Routledge.
Booth, R. (2017). Master of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn: ‘People are losing their minds. That is what we need to wake up to’. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/22/mindfulness-jon-kabat-zinn-depression-trump-grenfell?CMP=share_btn_fb [Accessed 6 Aug. 2024].
Brown, A.D. (2021). Identities in and around organizations: Towards an identity work perspective. Human Relations, 75(7), p.001872672199391. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726721993910.
Cannon, J. (2016). Education as the Practice of Freedom: A Social Justice Proposal for Mindfulness Educators. In: Purser, R., Forbes, D., Burke, A. (eds) Handbook of Mindfulness. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_26
Chiang, S. (2016) Inclusive Pedagogy: Research & Practice Contributing to Policy. University of Edinburgh. [Online]. Available at: https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/electionbriefing7-inclusive-pedagogy-15-05-16.pdf
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. (eBook in library)
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp.575–599.
Kattari, S.K. (2020). Ableist Microaggressions and the Mental Health of Disabled Adults. Community Mental Health Journal, 56, pp.1170–1179. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-020-00615-6
Tippett.K (2021). Interview, Resmaa Menakem — ‘Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence’. [online] The On Being Project. Available at: https://onbeing.org/programs/resmaa-menakem-notice-the-rage-notice-the-silence/
Robertson, A., Mulcahy, E. and Baars, S. (2022). What works to tackle mental health inequalities in higher education? Commissioned by The Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education (TASO). [online] Available at: https://s33320.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Report_What-works-to-tackle-mental-health-inequalities-in-higher-education_AW-Secured-1.pdf.
Richards, A. and Finnigan, T. (2015) ‘Embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum: An art and design practitioner’s guide.’ York: Higher Education Academy. Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/retention-and-attainment-disciplines-art-and-design [Accessed: 11 November 2022].
Scaramanga, N. (2019). Zen Lineage | How To Be Mindful. [online] How To Be Mindful. Available at: https://www.zenskills.co.uk/about [Accessed 6 Aug. 2024].
Schon, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Smyth, J. (2011) Critical pedagogy for social justice. New York: Continuum. [e-book in library]
Steventon, G., Cureton, D. and Clouder, L. (2016) Student attainment in higher education: issues, controversies and debates. London: Routledge. [e-book in library]
Zeidan, F. and Vago, D.R. (2016). Mindfulness meditation-based pain relief: a mechanistic account. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, [online] 1373(1), pp.114–127. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.13153.
Zylowska, L., Ackerman, D.L., Yang, M.H., Futrell, J.L., Horton, N.L., Hale, T.S., Pataki, C. and Smalley, S.L. (2008). Mindfulness Meditation Training in Adults and Adolescents With ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorders, 11(6), pp.737–746. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1087054707308502.