Engaging with Meditative Inquiry in Teaching, Learning, and Research

Realizing Transformative Potentials in Diverse Contexts

Ashwani Kumar, Ashwani Kumar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000575392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica della didattica

This collection of multi/inter-disciplinary essays explores the transformative potential of Ashwani Kumar's work on meditative inquiry – a holistic approach to teaching, learning, researching, creating, and living – in diverse educational contexts.

Aspiring to awaken awareness, intelligence, compassion, collaboration, and aesthetic sensibility among students and their teachers through self-reflection, critique, dialogue, and creative exploration, this volume:

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• Showcases unique ways in which scholars from diverse disciplinary, cultural, and geographic contexts have engaged with meditative inquiry in their own fields.

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• Provides a space where African, Asian, Buddhist, Indigenous, and Western scholars engage with the idea of meditative inquiry from their own cultural, philosophical, and spiritual traditions, perspectives, and practices.
  
  

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• Explores a variety of themes in relation to meditative inquiry including arts-based research, poetic inquiry, Africentricity, Indigenous thinking, martial arts, positive psychology, trauma, dispute resolution, and critical discourse analysis.

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• Offers insights into how the principles of meditative inquiry can be incorporated in classrooms and, thereby, contributes to the growing interest in mindfulness, meditation, and other holistic approaches in schools and academia.

The diverse and rich contributions contained in this volume offer valuable perspectives and practices for scholars, students, and educators interested in exploring and adopting the principles of meditative inquiry in their specific fields and contexts.

Exploring the Transformative Potentials of Meditative Inquiry in Diverse Contexts

1 My Journey With Meditative Inquiry Teaching, Learning, and Researching in Law and Dispute Resolution

Nayha Acharya

DOI: 10.4324/9781003128441-2

Harmony

“To me, music means a process of deepening my connection with the creative flow of existence. It is an unfoldment of meditative inquiry. Music is a living being which is ever present, and you can become part of it and flow with it when you are in a meditative state of mind. Then, you yourself become a part of this musical flow. It is vast and expansive like an ocean. It is an eternal source of rhythm, melody, and beauty.”

– Ashwani Kumar

Introduction ¹

I first learned about meditative inquiry when I met Ashwani Kumar while I was working on my PhD at the Schulich School of Law in Dalhousie University (Halifax, Canada), where I now teach. Like every other PhD student, I was living in a whirlwind of worry – there were palpable apprehensions about whether my project was either feasible or worthwhile, whether supervisors were satisfied or disappointed, and about the uncertainty of the future. Having been through the rigmarole of doctoral studies himself, Ashwani offered suggestions from time to time to slow down, to be aware of the internal turmoil without fighting and running from it, to give myself space and freedom to find out what I found purely enjoyable, and to give attention and importance to those things that I truly enjoy so that they may grow further. I recall that my instinctual reaction was an overwhelming feeling that I did not have time for any of that and making time for it would be irresponsible. The very suggestion would invoke a sense of anxious internal conflict. Moreover, it seemed to me that running away or hiding from anxieties was a perfectly rational response! After all, anxiety torments and naturally invokes a fight or flight response. Slowly, though, Ashwani’s ideas of looking inwards and understanding my consciousness – where those feeling of anxiety and internal conflict are rooted – began seeping into my life.

I started learning more about the idea of “meditative inquiry” first through deep and long conversations with Ashwani, though he hardly ever used the term meditative inquiry in those conversations. Our dialogues were rooted in the actuality of daily living and its problems. We probed existential questions meditatively. It seemed that for him meditative inquiry is not merely an academic construct but something that transpires in his life no matter the state of mind he is in – happy or sad, high or low – perhaps what J. Krishnamurti (1954) describes as choiceless awareness to “what is”. Subsequently, I read Ashwani’s book Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry (2013), and later I describe how the ideas presented there, as well as our ongoing conversations on the ideas of meditative inquiry, began to influence my teaching and my scholarly pursuits in law. I am happy to have this opportunity to share those developments in this chapter.

In Part One, I have detailed my experimentation with incorporating a meditative inquiry approach in my Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) course. This, as I describe further in the following, centralizes giving students the space and the freedom to explore their own unique relationships to the material that we study and work within the class and offering them the opportunity to express themselves in ways that invoke their own creativity.

In Part Two, I explain how my study of meditative inquiry, particularly through the text Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry, has led me to perceive an important gap in my approach to legal scholarship: although much of law and law scholarship centres around conflict and its resolution, we rarely, if ever, look into the heart of conflict itself, which, as Kumar aptly points out, is fundamentally rooted in conflicted human consciousness. So, while we continually debate which policies, laws, and legal procedures would best prevent conflicts or rectify their aftermaths, we rarely squarely recognize that no legal or societal structure will resolve the actual problem of conflict. Coming to this understanding has resulted in a shift in my orientation to legal scholarship. While I once focused exclusively on the traditional adjudicative process of conflict resolution, my scholarly agenda now includes a focus on conflict resolution mechanisms that may enable profound transformation of the individual, perhaps ultimately leading to deeper societal betterment. I discuss this shift further, which has led to my future goal of more deeply theorizing mediation (third-party facilitated conflict resolution) through the lens of meditative inquiry.

Part One: Meditative Inquiry and My Law School Teaching

Experimenting with aspects of the teaching as meditative inquiry approach (Kumar & Acharya, 2021; Kumar & Downey, 2018) in my ADR course has allowed me and (I believe) my students to become a community of learners, each empowered and motivated to explore and share our unique interests in ADR. Had I not adopted this approach, the students would have been exposed to key concepts in ADR, but they would not have had the space to investigate themselves and their interests (which, in my view, constitutes meditative inquiry), and through that inquiry, to develop a personal relationship with ADR.

Before I started learning about teaching as meditative inquiry, my approach to designing a course began with conjuring my image of an ideal lawyer and then constructing a course in a way that would help students approximate that ideal. I suspect that many instructors across disciplines adopt a similar outcomes-based pedagogical approach, by starting with asking ourselves, “What do I want the students to learn? What skills do I want them to gain? What kind of professionals do I want them to be?”

In the law school context, one may determine, for example, that we want lawyers who understand and can apply legal principles. Accordingly, we teach those principles, demonstrate how to apply them, and give students the opportunity to practice applying the principles through problem sets. We may also want lawyers to be critical, so we expose students to criticisms of the legal system, and we invite them to evaluate the critiques. We may want lawyers to be good oral advocates, so we encourage (or require) them to participate in moots. And so on. This way, we attempt to structure an educational program that gives every student the best chance of living up to our images of good lawyers.

In several respects, this approach is not only well-intentioned but also undoubtedly worthwhile. Lawyers do need to know how to effectively interpret and apply legal principles. They also need, in my view, some exposure to oral advocacy, and law schools should provide such training. But designing courses only from the starting point of “what kind of lawyers do we want?” risks boxing students into our pre-determined paradigms and causes us to encourage and incentivize students to live up only to our ideals. That fails to prioritize the students’ ability to discover their ideals, their own interests, concerns, and approaches, and their unique passions and aptitudes. In that process, we risk losing the unique spark that each individual student comes to law school with. This has begun to deeply concern me because as I learned about teaching as meditative inquiry, I realize that only those sparks can ignite the flame of intrinsic, authentic, and passionate engagement with life and with law.

Kumar’s notion of teaching as meditative inquiry centralizes the students’ authentic learning in the educational experience. It posits that the fundamental goal of educational experiences is to enable students to discover how they want to relate to the subject matter, allowing them to construct personalized pathways to engage with the subject matter, which in this instance comprises legal principles. It encourages teachers to allow space for a passionate inquiry into the subject matter and to make room for intrinsically motivated exploration of the relevant principles and skills. It invites us to find ways to enable students to uncover critiques that are meaningful to them. When we do so, students are given the freedom and the tools to develop their professional identities, guided by their own true interests.

Exploring teaching as meditative inquiry caused me to realize that my original approach to designing a course failed to set the stage for a particularly deep and meaningful education because it did not centralize students coming to their own appreciation of the subject matter I was teaching. I learned that if I could prioritize that, then the students’ engagement with the course content would more likely be authentic, passionate, and creative, which would lead to passionate and creative lawyers – something our society could only benefit from. I decided to give it a try.

My use of teaching as meditative inquiry in my classrooms is in its beginning stages, but I have attempted to apply its principles, at least to some extent, in my ADR class, a course about resolving disputes outside of court. I tell the students when I first meet them that a significant aspect of this course is about giving them the freedom to engage with ADR in a way that is meaningful to them, and I explain how that will be reflected throughout the class, as I recount later.

First, as Kumar explains, teaching as meditative inquiry invokes a dialogical approach to teaching and learning (Kumar & Downey, 2018). Through dialogue, participants learn to become aware of their thoughts, opinions, concerns, and they learn to practice articulating them with a group of people, all committed to the authentic and communal exploration of a topic. I have tried to build in space for such dialogues in the ADR class. One example I can offer is from the class where we focus on the concept of conflict. In this class, we discuss the legal system’s notion of conflict, ADR rooted critiques of that notion, and alternative theories of conflict. I assign some background readings prior to the class but engaging with those concepts and critiques exclusively unfolds through dialogue among the students and is not contingent on lecturing or one-way knowledge transfer. I facilitate the dialogue by posing the initial question(s), by rephrasing or seeking clarification from students, and at times by pointing out how certain points being raised relate to each other. I witness students looking inside themselves to understand and express their viewpoints. They raise examples of conflicts from their own lives (e.g., with parents, partners, roommates, and employers), sometimes sharing their own vulnerabilities. I watch their thinking deepen and develop over the course of the discussion. The dialogic method allows the subject matter to become personal for the students, and it allows for deeper shared exploration.

Second, I ask the students to keep a critical/creative reflection journal throughout the class. I request five entries on any topic that comes up in the class that has sparked the student’s interest. Students are invited to explain the experience and reflect on why it was impactful for them, and how it has contributed to their own self-identity as a lawyer, or conflict manager, or both. Guided by the teaching as meditative inquiry’s commitment to freedom, I opt to leave the topics for reflections very open so that students are free to reflect on anything that strikes them. Even experiences outside of the class that can be connected to the course are fair game. For instance, if someone finds themselves in a conflict situation in their outside lives and our discussion around personal conflict management styles comes to mind, then that experience can form the basis of a journal entry. I explain to students that the journals are like a journey into their own exploration of what they care about in relation to ADR and why, and the journals are a form of inquiry into what that tells them about themselves. My hope is that this assignment encourages students to look inwards and find their intrinsic motivations so that they can be guided by those instead of being overly influenced by extrinsic ideals. I read the critical journals at the end of the course. At times I have found myself moved at how deeply the students have allowed the experiences in the course to touch them.

Moreover, keeping with the teaching as meditative inquiry theme of freedom in both content and manner of expression, students are invited to prepare one or two pieces of art (a poem, a painting, a sculpture, etc.) and provide a brief explanation of how it relates to the class in lieu of one or two of their journal entries. One of my teachers had offered this to her students, and I had been searching for a way to incorporate it into one of my classes. The first time I invited artistic expressions, I wondered whether students would take to it. Now, I have shelves and walls full of delightful pieces of art from my former students, some of whom commented that they loved being able to do something that they enjoyed ‘guilt-free’ because it was part of a course. Again, this allows students to become personally connected to the subject matter that is meaningful to them. Following are examples of the artwork submitted in this course. These pieces were created by Karina McLean, a student in my ADR class of 2020. Together, they depict adversarial versus holistic dispute resolution.

The final part of the c...