8.2: Weeks 1 and 2 Narrative

Weeks One and Two Narrative

Like any course, the first class(es) involve getting students familiar with the course, the material, and the teacher expectations. This is an OER course and, therefore, students do not have a textbook that they can review beforehand. Accordingly, it is important to get the syllabus to them before the first class with the communicated expectation that they look it over carefully in advance of the class start date. Alternatively, it may be worth having a meeting of enrolled students prior to the beginning of the semester if that is an option.

Most obviously different about this course (and what students need to know going in), is that, in addition to in-class mindfulness practices, they will be required to have a mindfulness practice four other days a week. Of course, an instructor could impose a daily practice requirement as well.

Students knowing and agreeing to this are critical to the course success. In line with that, for the second class in week one, students are asked to prepare a reflection paper on what they are willing to put into the class. Intention-setting itself can be a mindfulness practice and may enhance student performance. This follows nicely the assignment for the first class: a reflection paper on what students hope to get out of this course.

Another goal at the beginning of the semester is immediately to begin practicing mindfulness meditations and to introduce some of the more basic mindfulness practices, starting with breath meditations. It is also important for students to know from the onset that although a mindfulness practice is a requirement, they have choices about how to do individual practices. This is key for trauma-informed teaching of mindfulness: to be clear that what the teacher is offering is invitational and students should always listen and pay attention to their own bodies. Breathing meditations, for instance, are among the most common yet can be triggering for certain individuals. Also, closing one’s eyes can be challenging for some folks.

Accordingly, it is important early on to emphasize that students are in charge and if something is not working for them during a mindfulness practice, then they should not do it. This can be handled lightly by giving options. By offering, for instance, when setting up a mindfulness posture, the choice of closing one's eyes or, if that does not feel right, having a downward gentle gaze that will be just as effective. For further resources on trauma-sensitive mindfulness, check out David Treleaven. He wrote the book---literally---Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness. His website has a short, free webinar on the topic, plus other helpful material.

So, for the first two weeks, I have students meditating each class, writing short reflection papers on what they hope to get out of and what they are willing to honestly put into this course. In the first week, we also discuss the requirement of keeping logs and journals as a record of their mindfulness practice. To this end, I provide a link to a sample meditation log and tell students they may use this one or find or develop their own.

 We will also:

•  review the syllabus and answer any student questions about it,
• try out several meditation apps—I provide a link to some free options—and have an exploration of apps as a specific assignment early in the course,
• develop community guidelines for class participation, and
•  read some or all of several law review articles which describe some very basic practices, an overview of the benefits of mindfulness, and a brief word on the neuroscience. We also read an essay by a law student describing her experience taking a mindful lawyer course.

I introduce much of the mindfulness science through two videos and a guest speaker. This could be sequenced in multiple ways; it is probably valuable to have at least some of that information appear early in the course. To accomplish this, students watch, as a class assignment, a 57-minute PBS video entitled The Mindfulness Movement. I start with this one because it is short(ish), quite informative with interviews of some of the key names in mindfulness, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the catalyst for many mindfulness programs.  It also presents the into-mindfulness-practice narratives of several individuals, some of whom may be recognizable to students and, if not, whose stories are fairly compelling.  Further, this video hints at the science behind it, which gets fuller treatment in the documentary My Year of Living Mindfully, which I also have students watch in the first third of the course.

In the very first class, I showed the nine-minute video This is Water—available courtesy of youtube. An older, non-mindfulness explicit video, I find it a rather compelling piece on the value of choosing to pay attention, to be aware, to move from a mindless default mode into a place where one can choose how to respond. It is an adaptation of a David Foster Wallace commencement address.

Below are two less-than-three-minute animated videos on mindfulness—showing one of them may be a nice feature of your first class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKryaN44ss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6T02g5hnT4