Hey welcome to EDFN 6956 which is mindfulness and education.
I think all of you know who i am but just in case anybody new enters the
class right at the last minute
i'm Dr. Alison Barton and it's great to have you in this class.
I wanted to just have a brief introductory video to let you know that
this is going to be a very different kind of class especially if you've had
me before as an instructor.
This one's going to be a whole lot looser and there are still a lot of
engagement require from you but it's not really going to I hope not feel really as
demanding a rigorous as much as it is interesting and really pulling you in
wanting to explore things and talk about it with others in the class. And one of
the reasons that the class is a lot looser,
well to two reasons one is the nature of the content itself kind of lends itself
to being more at ease and encouraging you to be at ease as well.
The other reason is because i'm making an assumption that you are taking this
class because you were interested in this material this is a voluntary class
so there's a reason you want to take it may be to help you with your own
mindfulness practices or to explore hopefully to explore a little bit about
how you would like to implement mindfulness into your classroom as you
become a teacher.
Both for yourself and for your students ok so
I only recently decided to put this course online and because of that i'm
doing some really mad scrambling to try to get things ready
so I know that by the time the semester begins it won't quite be done and I
can't make this schedule quite as detailed as i prefer to give you so
probably what i'll do is have a fairly detailed schedule for the first few
modules explain that in a second and then a rough one on the syllabus to give
you at least starting out so you can see the direction we're going
and then as i get the rest of the class pulled together i'm going to try to stay
ahead of you all on this. i will update the schedule and let you know so that
you can do the best you can at planning the things that will take the most time
are going to be like little projects and I'm going to let you know about that
pretty early on in as the course get started
so you learn about that as we go.
The general layout for how we're going to do things is that we have the this sounds
intimidating but these are smaller than modules from my other classes but we
have about ten modules of areas or chunks of things we want to just explore
and learn about and within those there will be some sub modules of activities
some of the activities will be more academic in nature and other activities
are going to be experiential. For both of them
there's a lot of discussions going on so I'm going to ask you often to post your
responses or reflections to the group and the way i'm setting up
I think all of the discussions unless they screw up somewhere is that you
can't see anyone elses responses until you have first responded but then I do
want you to be engaged.
There are some discussions where it it's good to look back and see what people
posted but it's not necessarily useful to engage in a conversation with them
there will be others where I think it is useful to kind of exchange ideas after
you've posted your one initial post. For the academic side of things in
particular there will also be a little bit of of well they'll be some written
work a lot of it's going to probably be short my goal is to keep these segments
fairly short and feel doable and containable i do have to have stuff to
kind of measure your progress
so that's why I'm throwing those things in there and also hoping to keep you
engaged with the material as we go along. For the experiential side that's
primarily going to be discussions and kind of asking you to go through minutes
mindfulness practices that you'll be introduced to as we go for both of those
types of sub modules
i'm setting them up so that they are sequential you can't go on to the next
thing until you've done the thing before it a lot of these little things are
short
they don't take too much time a little bit of reading a little post in the
discussion coming back to do a little more reading or do
mindfulness practice or something like that so just to let you know that
there are those limits to help kind of track you down, funnel you down into
where we need you to be at the right time and I'll usually have one academic
sub-module going concurrently with an experiential sub-module so you can be
tackling a couple of things at around the same time.
Ok, i'm also trying to figure out how we're going to tie in what I was going
to give you as homework.
I don't want to call it homework and we'll learn why I don't want to call it
homework when we get to Ellen Langer stuff and her textbook but but there
will be something else about like things to do on the side or readings to to be
taken care of as we're going through this.
The turnaround on each of these sub modules is going to be quick.
My goal is to still keep it primarily in a within a three week kinda tight
context although i'm willing to extend like deadlines for the projects beyond
our three weeks. I'm going to keep the three-week thing because that's kind of
what i originally promised but what that means is that each of these sub modules
probably will probably need to be done and i'll make this clear on the schedule
within one or two days
you need to be timely getting in there because things are so discussion
oriented and because i want you all to be seeing what the others have posted
sometimes moving on
needs you to kind of see what others have said too.
So the sooner people can get in there and get active the better but I'm
looking at rough timing and I'm trying to give you time estimates as we go as
well and I'm thinking that most of these modules are done in an hour to an hour
and a half, the big ones. And maybe a little longer than that but those are kind of
what I was planning to do in a day of our original on ground course
so I'm just trying to keep things pretty close to aligned but that probably means
dedicating several you know three hours maybe four a day to the class just to
keep up with the readings and so forth and then and there may be days where it
doesn't take that long and I hope you find it enjoyable throughout. A quick
reminder that the books are by David and Langer and you should be able to find
those the titles of the bookstore but i really hope you have it i'm going to
send an email to remind you to get them early. But make sure you have those handy
because we're going to get started read reading those really quickly
ok welcome again and hopefully things will become very self evident very
quickly.
The next thing probably you'll see once i get everything set up is the syllabus.