ABSTRACT
This chapter considers an under-represented topic of secular-scientific mindfulness: Its potential role in directly motivating and improving learning and inquiry. Inquiry-based learning refers to the use of investigation, curiosity, and interest as motivators and strategies for learning, which mindfulness is theorized to foster and further. The scientific literature on the topic is limited, but the chapter considers the recognized role of mindfulness in experiential learning, with implications for its role in the inquiry cycle: Mindfulness itself as inquiry (pre-practice, in-practice, and post-practice inquiry); investigative inquiry (questioning, reflecting, sustaining inquiry); and meta-inquiry (including adaptive, anti-oppressive, and creative inquiry). As an inquiry continuum, these offer an inductive model for mindfulness-based teaching and learning with important implications for integrating mindfulness in studies and practices across mainstream disciplinary and professional curricula. This inductive inquiry process, moving from more direct experience to more conceptual forms of investigation through to awareness of the conditioned nature of inquiry itself.
