Mindfulness in Honors: An Experiment in Collaborative Learning and Team Teaching.

What do students hear when we talk of mindfulness? To reframe unexamined assumptions among students who conceptualize both mindfulness and honors education as "doing more" (more exercises to gain psychological benefits and more work to gain higher GPAs), the authors of this paper piloted a new course in philosophy and religious studies. In this essay, they discuss their collaborative experience designing, co-teaching, and assessing an honors course on mindfulness: its roots in Buddhist thought and practices, its contemporary secular developments, and its potential impact on students' learning and lived experience. Integral to this experiment is also an approach to teaching philosophy and religious studies in the context of a general education curriculum that aims at presenting the disciplines and their focus areas as forms of collaborative experiential learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]