Faculty Reading Circle on Contemplative Practices Session 1

Critical thinking is a complex set of skills and dispositions related to the analysis and synthesis of information, including an awareness of one's own cognitive and affective biases, to form an evaluation. This skillset is deployed differently across academic fields but is among the most commonly agreed-upon goals of higher education. How do we foster critical thinking in our students, and what additional benefits might we see when we approach this learning in a mindful way? During this reading circle, we'll discuss David Sable's article (2014), "Reason in Service of the Heart: The Impacts of Contemplative Practices on Critical Thinking," which includes both qualitative and quantitative data to evaluate the impact of a suite of mindful and contemplative practices on dispositions underlying critical thinking. Along the way, we'll engage in a few of the practices Sable describes and consider their impacts on us as faculty, and their potential impacts on our own students.

Reading focus

Sable, D. (2014). Reason in the Service of the Heart: The Impacts of Contemplative Practices on Critical Thinking. Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 1 (1).

About the facilitator

Kelsey Bitting, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Elon University.

Kelsey Bitting, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and a former Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Elon University. She has been leading mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy programming for faculty for nearly a decade, and incorporates mindfulness practices into her undergraduate teaching and faculty workshops on a variety of topics. As a discipline-based education researcher, Bitting investigates the impacts of nontraditional approaches to teaching Earth and environmental science (and STEM more broadly) on student learning, interest, motivation, and sense of belonging. Bitting currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Geoscience Education, and is a founding past-president of the Mindfulness and Contemplative Pedagogy Special Interest Group of the POD Network and past-president of the Geoscience Education Research Division of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.