In the initiative “Engaging Education in Buddhist Studies” (EEBS), established in 2019 with support from Khyentse Foundation and the Ho Centre, our instructors are creating modules for Buddhist studies courses that combine creative and/or contemplative practices that are grounded in research on the benefits of experiential education, including increased engagement, self-confidence, and compassion among student-participants. The goals of this initiative are to make student participation in classroom work more accessible, to amplify diverse voices in the classroom, and to support overall wellness and mental health among students. This project is part of our growing priority on programming that supports experiential learning, equity, and student well-being, following principles of place-responsive and trauma-informed pedagogy.
This initiative aims to bring the teaching of Buddhist Studies into the company of newly developing, dynamic educational movements that are student-centered, place-responsive, contemplative, trauma-informed, and attentive to student well-being. Well-tested approaches to embodied or engaged pedagogy emphasize the value of engaging students’ senses and their bodies in the process of studying religion, and much of our work is inspired by these approaches. This project also strives to help students feel connected to the lives of real Buddhists, historically or today, by interacting with stories, religious and aesthetic objects, movement, food, and ritual, and by taking interest in the concerns of householder Buddhists as well as monastics.
In 2019-20, the first year of the project, EEBS work was incorporated into eight U of T courses. Experiential modules developed for those courses included activities where students did the following types of work:
- Students maintained regular contemplative and wellness practices in class and at home, and class time has been devoted to learning movement and breathing practices with local scholar-practitioners.
- Students worked with traditional metal funnel tools (chakpur) to create sand mandalas in class and discussed how mandalas make meaning (impermanence and purposeful transience, difficulty of process and production).
- Students worked with a local Tibetan artist to sculpt torma (offering cakes) out of clay and coloured clay. They learned about the form, why they are made, and how they create substitutes for other kinds of imagined offerings
- Students worked with a local Tibetan artist to learn how to paint the Buddha’s head, studying the iconometric method used to measure a traditional Buddha head with its correct relative proportions according to the Tibetan art tradition.
- In “Speaking Out and Listening In” assignments, students conduct conversations while actively witnessing their thoughts and emotions and maintaining focused attention on what they’re hearing from the other person (when in the role of listener). This is a widely-known and well-studied practice that takes slightly different forms in different situations: it is similar to a practice of socially-engaged Zen Buddhism called Bearing Witness; it shares features of a “listening circle” found in many Indigenous communities; and as part of anti-oppression pedagogies, it is sometimes known as Embodied Listening or Mindful Listening.
- In Micro-phenomenological Reflection assignments, students consider their changing or multiple understandings of things like “self” or “experience” in relation to course materials and their own lived or embodied experiences. This is a practice of active philosophical thinking, in which students deeply consider subjective experience in the context of their own historical, social, educational and cultural circumstances. These reflections are brought into class discussions such that students’ individual voices and life experiences are rich sources of “data” for consideration and discussion. This type of work is familiar in some philosophy and cognitive science courses and research projects, where it is sometimes known as micro-phenomenology, a sub-discipline that facilitates close exploration of lived experience.