Contemplative practices and teacher professional becoming

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed increasing interest in the potential place of contemplative practices (such as mindfulness, meditation and yoga) in education. Regarding the lives and work of teachers, research in this area has focused almost exclusively on mindfulness-based interventions and related outcomes of stress, burnout and wellbeing, neglecting important questions regarding teacher professional identities, ethics and agency. This paper presents findings from an in-depth qualitative study that examined the role of contemplative practices in the professional becoming of seven beginning teachers using research interviews, ethnographic observation and participatory visual methods. The study explored how participants understood, imagined and enacted contemplative practices in their lives as teachers, revealing a complex ecology of personal histories, multiple practices, secular/instrumental and spiritual/transformational aims, the expression of which was mediated by intersecting personal and institutional contexts. Practices of contemplation acted as nodes of stability within the spaces of considerable vulnerability, uncertainty and flux which characterise early experiences of teaching. Specifically, they inflected professional becoming by providing a distinctive telos to teaching activity, making available existential ways of being grounded in calm, compassionate, presence and, for some participants, stimulated radical questioning of the nature of the (teacher) self, itself. These findings add much-needed complexity to debate about the uses of mindfulness and other contemplative practices in education, and provide an important new evidence-base for considering the role of contemplative practices in initial teacher education and professional development.