ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a path of practice using contemplative pedagogies across a diversity of courses and student standpoints between the years 2014 and 2020: Human-Animal Studies, Advanced Composition, and a second-year required composition course, themed as “Sustainable Happiness.” Courses variously explored uses of mindfulness in cultivating multispecies empathy, creativity and self-compassion, and true happiness as collective interbeing rather than an exclusively individual property to be acquired through consumption. Review from the university’s Institutional Review Board, along with tools such as consent forms, qualitative and quantitative pre- and post-tests, positive psychology’s lists of happiness practices, and attentiveness to fidelity of implementation guided the study. In each course, these measures and related course materials cultivate the uses of contemplative pedagogies as anti-oppressive pedagogy.
