Premium
Look Before You Leap: Reconsidering Contemplative Pedagogy
Author(s) -
Fisher Kathleen M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
teaching theology and religion
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.165
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1467-9647
pISSN - 1368-4868
DOI - 10.1111/teth.12361
Subject(s) - contemplation , active listening , meditation , psychology , pedagogy , empathy , reading (process) , epistemology , set (abstract data type) , sociology , social psychology , philosophy , psychotherapist , theology , linguistics , computer science , programming language
This paper presents a critique of a set of teaching strategies known as “contemplative pedagogy.” Using practices such as meditation, attentive listening, and reflective reading, contemplative inquiry focuses on direct first‐person experience as an essential means of knowing that has historically been overshadowed and dismissed by an emphasis on analytical reasoning. In this essay, I examine four problematic claims that appear frequently in descriptions of contemplative pedagogy: (1) undergraduate students have a kind of spiritual hunger; (2) pedagogies focused on cognitive skills teach students only what, not how, to think; (3) self‐knowledge fosters empathy; and (4) education needs a new epistemology centered on spiritual and emotional, rather than intellectual, experience. I argue that these claims underestimate the diversity of undergraduate students, the complexity of what it means to think and know, the capacity for self‐knowledge to become self‐absorption, and the dangers of transgressing the boundaries between intellectual, psychological, and religious experiences. [See as well “Response to Kathleen Fisher's ‘Look Before You Leap,’” by Andrew O. Fort and Louis Komjathy, published in this issue of the journal.]