Meditation Time in the Classroom: Mindfulness Dosage and Undergraduate Psychological Distress

Objectives: The present study examined the differences in participants’ individual psychological distress over four points in time while they received instructions on a guided mindfulness meditation practice differing in practice time between the two groups (20 minutes or 5 minutes). The study took place in an undergraduate yoga course at a large metropolitan university in the Southeastern United States. Data were collected over the four points in time during one continuous semester using the Outcome Questionnaire-45.2 (OQ-45.2) (Lambert et al., 2004; Tabet et al., 2019). Methods: The purpose of this 15-week quantitative study was to compare the differences in individual psychological distress among 74 students split into two treatment groups. The first treatment group received a 20-minute body scan based on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) treatment per session. The second treatment group received a 5-minute body scan treatment per session. Results and Conclusion: Using a repeated measures ANOVA, the researchers examined how mindfulness meditation practice affected psychological distress between the 5-minute and 20-minute sessions. The results showed that as the meditation sessions progressed, the interaction of subscales of distress by mindfulness meditation sessions was not statistically significant. However, the results showed there were significant main effects for symptom distress level, F(1) = 10.34, p = 0.02; interpersonal relations, F(1) = 14.61, p \u3c 0.01; and social role performance, F(1) = 4.33, p = 0.04, which decreased significantly. In conclusion, the main effect was statistically significant; the difference in distress is related to whether a person meditated at all. That is, meditate once and you will likely feel reduced distress of some level

Memes and Social Messages: Teaching a Critical Literacies Curriculum on DAPL

This article documents the design and implementation of a culturally responsive critical media literacies curriculum centered around media representations of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Students (grades 6-8) were invited to discuss media imagery relating to DAPL and to create memes reflecting their understandings. To situate this work, we articulate a framework that blends critical media literacies and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. We analyze students’ spoken and multimodal responses to a curriculum that purposefully foregrounded Native perspectives and digital media. Ultimately, we argue that students must be invited to leverage their epistemic privilege in responding to contemporary social issues

Course Redesign to New Paradigms: Exploring Humanizing Racial Literacies with Pre-Service Teachers

Spring 2021, undergraduate students across the country were entering their second year of obligatory online learning. This moment in time correlated with an increased attention to the Black Lives Matter movement by white youth and the mainstream public. This study, guided by a team of teacher educators committed to realizing racial justice in Secondary literacy education, designed and examined the impact of humanizing racial literacies curriculum taught through forced on learning on undergraduate pre-service teacher’s perspectives about anti-racist curriculum design. This study builds upon a growing body of research on realizing humanizing racial literacies in teacher education pedagogy. The curriculum sought to deconstruct binary racial orientations prevalent among the dominant teaching population in the United States attending a PWI. Class activities included: interrogating white supremacy, colonization, police brutality and violence through strategic text selection and humanizing pedagogical methods. Predominantly white pre-service teachers partnered with predominantly BIPOC high school students through online interactions to discuss themes related to racism, homophobia, sexism, and decolonialism. We used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as our primary analytical framework for interpreting student discourse emergent across the data sources. Findings show how students navigated obstacles related to deconstructing their beliefs about the role of social media and student capacity for engaging critical literacies. And we highlight how pre-service teachers achieved pedagogical paradigm shifts related to these obstacles. Ultimately, through an intentionally redesigned class, teacher education candidates reflected on their learning related to realizing humanizing racial literacies over the course of the Spring 2021 academic semester