ABSTRACT
Over the last decades, there has been growing interest in the West for mindfulness meditation in science, care, business, and education. Teachers adopting mindfulness meditation primarily acknowledge its potential benefits, yet critical scholarship highlighted that while mindfulness may support resilience, it may also enhance resignation or contribute to an increased medicalization of life. In addition, this practice would place a higher burden of moral responsibility on the children with regard to their well-being, personal protection, and self-surveillance. In keeping with this concern, this chapter will address how far mindfulness meditation may be instrumental in constructing an educational subject which is consistent with neoliberal ideology and shall discuss the limits of this conceptualization. Relying on an ethnographic research project among Swiss international schools offering mindfulness practice and trainings, this chapter will discuss the relevance of a conceptualization of mindfulness as a “technology of the self”, as well as the need to balance this conceptualization with empirical observations. Following the daily practice of mindfulness meditation contextualized in one classroom, this chapter will point to pedagogical intentions related to the development of metacognition and reflexivity: mindfulness is about developing awareness in order for the children to become reflective in their own behaviour as social actors and learners. In doing so, mindfulness meditation positions the children as self-agents of their learning process. This reflective way to frame autonomy echoes the specific microcosm to which the school belongs – namely, an “educational cosmopolitan enclave” where children of diplomats and CEOs mingle with local elites before moving on to other destinations across the globe. In conclusion, the chapter insists on the need to balance both discourses of the promoters of mindfulness meditation on socio-emotional learning and critical approaches with a careful study of the modalities of implementation of the practice of mindfulness in educational settings.
