Journal Article
4 May 2026
Current Issue: The Wisdom-Centered Classroom: Contemplative Pathways to Healing, Interbeing, and Peace in K–12 Education (Special Issue)
Volume 4, Issue 1 (2026)Read More
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Journal Article4 May 2026Reimagining Masculinities through Australian Indigenous Pedagogies
In the face of intersecting ecological crises and persistent gender inequality, this paper explores how dominant norms of masculinity—marked by control, detachment, conquest, and other ideals rooted in Western, hegemonic paradigms—contribute to environmental degradation. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, Australian Indigenous pedagogies, and contemplative education, we examine how relational, place-based approaches may offer transformative alternatives for boys in schooling contexts. Central to this inquiry is the Learning from Country framework, which positions land as teacher and emphasizes practices of deep listening, reciprocity, and ethical engagement with the more-than-human world. We argue that this pedagogical approach challenges dominant masculinities by fostering care and interconnectedness. Through a classroom-based vignette from a Grade 1 setting in Metropolitan Sydney, which is situated on the ancestral lands of the Dharug People, we illustrate how subtle shifts in pedagogy—such as foraging for natural art materials and ritualized return to place—can create meaningful opportunities for boys to engage in relational learning. These moments are framed not only as ecologically responsive, but as spiritually and ethically significant, echoing recent calls for the cultivation of ecological virtues and interiority in education. By weaving together theoretical analysis and lived experience, this paper highlights how educators can play a critical role in supporting boys to resist masculinist norms and instead inhabit more relational and sustainable ways of being.
Current Articles
- Journal Article3 November 2025
The Connect with Kindness Curriculum: Integrating Heart, Brain, and Whole-Child Development through Holistic Education
This paper presents Connect with Kindness, a holistic, trauma-informed, and child-centered curriculum designed to foster emotional literacy, empathy, and moral imagination through lived experiences of kindness. Grounded in the pedagogical legacies of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Janusz Korczak, and Vasyl Sukhomlinsky—and enriched by contemporary insights from neuroscience and psychology—the curriculum reflects a contemplative and relational approach to education. Drawing on over 1,800 multimedia submissions from children in 45 countries, Connect with Kindness elevates children’s voices as co-creators of learning and encourages deep reflection through nature-based experiences, art, peer dialogue, and community engagement. By integrating Dr. Bruce Perry’s neurodevelopmental model and Dr. Jamil Zaki’s work on the plasticity of empathy, the curriculum offers an emotionally attuned framework for cultivating presence, compassion, and ethical action. Preliminary findings from pilot schools in diverse international settings reveal growth in students’ self-regulation, inclusion, and sense of belonging. This paper argues that kindness, when nurtured through holistic and contemplative practices, becomes not only a moral anchor but also a vital pathway to educational and communal well-being. - Journal Article7 August 2026
Centering as Contemplative Inquiry and Practice: Teaching, Learning, and Living in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene may be an inescapable trap—one unwittingly shaped by human ways of relating to self, others, and the more-than-human world. While dominant discourses surrounding this epoch often evoke fear, apocalypse, or blame, how might it also invite us, as humans, into an opportunity for more holistic and contemplative education. This paper explores “centering,” a contemplative concept and practice introduced by curriculum theorist James Macdonald (1995), as a regenerative way of engaging with the Anthropocene through lived experience. Drawing from research on a graduate-level place-based course and an arts-based, pragmatic inquiry, I explore how centering can foster attunement to place, self, and relationality. The paper argues that centering offers an alternative to disembodied and displaced educational experiences—so prevalent within the Anthropocene—by reconnecting mind, body, and environment in meaningful, situated ways.
Most Popular Articles
- Journal Article2 May 2023
Holistic Learning Theory: More than a Philosophy
Abstract. An educational philosophy identifies and clarifies a set of values and understandings with respect to education that are based on a set of beliefs. A theory is a way to explain a set of facts and understand phenomena. Philosophies are conceptual. Theories are practical. Holistic education is a philosophy of education; however, it is also a robust theory of learning that should be included with the other theories of learning. This article describes holistic education as an educational theory. - Journal Article30 April 2023
Becoming the Imperfect Friend: Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Contemplative Pathways to Healing and Reconciliation in Higher Education
Throughout this reflective essay I explore Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Indigenous philosophy and contemplative education as ethical pathways to healing and reconciliation in higher education. I put forth the idea of becoming the imperfect friend in a world ethos of death by a thousand cuts as a response to the violence of colonialism perpetuated in academia. I reflect on the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh values of eslhélha7kwhiws and stélmexw as contemplative dispositions that lend themselves to the process of becoming the imperfect friend. I conclude by describing a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh -led program hosted by Simon Fraser University (SFU) in 2022-2023, named Moving Together In The Ways of The People. The program is captured in a documentary film following a dedicated group SFU educators, graduate students and staff endeavouring to take meaningful action towards reconciliation by embarking on a sacred learning journey led by Sḵwx̱wú7mesh elders and knowledge carriers on traditional, ancestral, unceded Coast Salish territories. - Journal Article4 January 2025
The Laughing Buddha: The Education of Compassionate Leaders through Improvisational Play
With an urgency to build a generative future, educational systems do not have a choice but to pay attention to how and what we train our future leaders. Yet there is still a gap as leadership studies are often relegated as a “soft” skill, rather than integrated as technical knowledge critical to the holistic effectiveness of a tertiary education. As a result, there is often a disconnect between students immersed in the idealistic bubble of the academy and graduates navigating life outside. Inquiry- and reflective-based methods of contemplative practices may be critical for leaders to avoid short-term, short-sighted decisions that ill prepare people and communities for continuous change and upheaval. With human, more than human, and planetary health at risk, the need for wise leadership is necessary to discern the paths forward for a more generative future. Fortunately, there has been increased attention of and call for leadership rooted in compassion as a strategic approach to leadership. Research around contemplative practices, such as gratitude and mindful meditation, offer evidence that they help strengthen the capacity to lead with and for compassion. This article explores another, often overlooked, contemplative practice: improvisational play and humor. Indeed, compassion and humor have been inextricably linked across many knowledge traditions. This article examines how the applied contemplative practice of improvisational play and humor offer an untapped opportunity for institutions of higher education to close the gap between theory and practice and to fulfill its responsibility of cultivating wise leaders of tomorrow. - Journal Article10 February 2024
Well-Being in Response to Gratitude Interventions: A Student Elicitation Approach
Various methods exist to invoke gratitude, such as gratitude lists, acts directed towards others, and gratitude contemplation (Rash, Matsuba, and Prkachin, 2011). This study, through student perception elicitation, examines a gratitude list intervention in a professional development undergraduate class which tests the gratitude and enhanced well-being connection theory. Results suggest various reasons why students perceive a connection between gratitude lists and mental and physical well-being, although there was an overall belief among participants that gratitude lists help more with mental health than physical health. Also, the gratitude and enhanced well-being connection theory was not fully supported as overall respondent sentiment shifted after the gratitude intervention with fewer respondents believing than beforre the intervention that a gratitude list can help with mental and physical well-being. While the current results show a lower frequency of the belief that gratitude lists can help with well-being, students overall still enjoyed the exercise and recommended more contemplative practices in the classroom. - Journal Article30 May 2025
Healing in Relation: Honoring Post-Graduate Grief as an Opportunity for Relational Scholarship
This paper is a three-way conversation about grief that follows a graduate program. We explore our experiences with post-graduate grief in community, attending to each other’s sense of loss following separation from supervisors, theses, and graduate programs. In committing to slow scholarship, processes—such as navigating feelings and living—have been valued over producing a manuscript quickly. Slowness, including long gaps between meetings, enabled us to follow the diverse contours of quiet alchemical processes such as grieving, opening up to emptiness, self-acceptance, being enough, and letting go. After years of compression and dialogic friction with her mentor, Tanya confronts feelings akin to postpartum depression, an anticlimactic melancholy accompanying the completion of her doctorate. Chris is haunted by his inability to recognize the authenticity of repeated invitations from his committee to engage following his Master’s degree, finally breaking his 16-year silence through narrative inquiry into losing what he never knew he had. Anna admits to filling emotional and intellectual gaps following her Master’s degree by pursuing her doctorate. She honors wholeness of herself that encompasses ruptures of grief, confusion, and her journey towards self-acceptance. Emerging from our collaboration is something entirely unexpected: healing. We share our private experiences of post-graduate mourning and re-emergence as an invitation to students to honor what comes unbidden following a graduate journey and an opportunity for relational scholarship. - Journal Article4 May 2023
From Without to Within: Inner Transformation as a Pedagogy for Social Activism
Change has become the urgency of our time, as the harrowing Anthropocene and ongoing socio-political crises are challenging the future of humanity and our planet. While systemic structural forces are often (and rightfully so) the target to blame, social activism is as much about our own path of inner change as it is about attempting to create a better world externally. This aspect of social activism can easily become misunderstood as inertia, while more traditional forms of resistance aimed at subverting macro-structures are favored. In this essay, I draw from literature on spirituality and consciousness, new biology, quantum sciences, as well as nature studies and education, to shed light on a new form of social activism that calls for each person to recognize our role in co-creating the world, and emphasizes spiritual awakening as the most vital feature of human flourishing. Social change in the external domain will not last unless we have done the inner work to weed out misconceptions, biases, and wrong thinking that led us to contemporary crises in the first place. The essay discussed the elevation of human consciousness through the aid of nature and yogic sciences as the need of the hour, and as the most crucial aspects of social activism in the new era.