Miller-Lane on Contemplating a Mind-Based Education

Education studies professor Jonathan Miller-Lane gave a public lecture last Wed., Feb. 19, that began with medieval church music — with improvisation on the saxophone — and ended with him standing in a white Aikido hakama, a traditional piece of samurai clothing worn in various forms of martial arts.

In his lecture, titled “Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice: An Inclusive Vision for a ‘Global’ Liberal Arts College,” he sought to synthesize purely intellectual pursuits with experiential learning and merge body, brain and spirit together in the work that students and faculty do. It came at a time when the faculty is debating whether certain internship experiences should be counted toward academic credits, in the context of an even larger debate about the subordinated nature of experiential learning in the liberal arts education. Instead of picking any one side of the argument, Miller-Lane argued that learning is mind-based, not brain-based, in order to find a creative solution to the liberal — or illiberal — education dichotomy.

While we should prioritize our intellectual mission on this campus, he argued, we need to understand that becoming a better thinker is not all just brainwork.

“To talk about the mind is to speak of the marvelous and unique expression of body, brain, and spirit that is the human being,” he said, and when we understand our mind as “embodied, lived experience” then we will start “attending to the bodies on one’s campus, and the experience of those bodies… That brings with it a profound commitment to inclusion,” he said. This means that we all need to constantly remind ourselves that “there is no prototypical Middkid, there is no ‘normal,’” he said. “There is just us, each and every one of us, here, working on making sense of our lives and trying to make this place work as a community of safety, challenge, discomfort and, hopefully, beauty.”

And how might this be possible on a campus where students, faculty and staff alike all seem to be rushing to do everything?

This is where “contemplative practices” come in, which refer to meditation and mindfulness exercises. Several professors on campus have pioneered this pedagogy, including environmental studies professor Rebecca Gould. She feels that contemplative practices don’t “interfere with the rigor of the class, but enhance it.”
“We are accustomed to rushing through material, rushing through our days, multi-tasking and feeling stressed,” she said. “I highly value productivity, but I worry about when the drive to ‘do things’ begins to interfere with deep learning and with meeting one another as whole people. So it’s always a challenge to move away from our default way of doing things, but once you get past the challenge, the benefits are rich and on-going. My students have reported on the challenges and benefits in a fairly consistent way over the years.”

Kelsey Follansbee ’16.5 is currently taking a class with environmental studies professor Marc Lapin, who also uses contemplative practices in class. One exercise prompt: “consider a party we had essentially marginalized in our conversation about sustainability,” Follansbee said. “Taking several minutes to reflect enabled me to open up and find new meaning in our discussion and its implications.”

All to say, contemplative practices are not only beneficial to the well-being of the learners, but they can actually be used to find “innovative ways to engage with the content of a course,” as Professor Gould suggested. Specifically, they “help us know, experience and understand at an inner personal level the real connections and inter-relationships that we live every day,” Professor Lapin said.

Such practices that lead to inclusion have received more praises than sneers. Alongside students and faculty’s overall support for bringing such practices to the classrooms based on class feedbacks, there is a group that gathers every semester to share ideas, according to Lapin. They also invite outside practitioners, as well as staff and students, to share their experiences and practices. Even so, Gould thinks that these practices can be adopted more widely.

“I am hoping to create some occasions where we can share what we do with other interested, but less experienced, faculty,” he said.

The choice of the medieval church music at the beginning of Miller-Lane’s lecture was not random, of course.

“The combination of a saxophone improvising over medieval polyphony was meant to reflect two fundamental ideas of Western music: improvisation and composition,” Miller-Lane said. “I was suggesting that at its best a Middlebury education might offer the same opportunity for us as students, staff and faculty – we encounter the traditions of learning (compositions) while, hopefully, cultivating and supporting students’ ability to add their own improvisation.”

With this new insight into what the learning process constitutes, it seems like faculty and students are only going to demand more opportunities to regain the intentionality to their work in the classroom. Experiential learning and contemplative practices need not be seen as threats to the traditional intellectual rigor, but complements to that experience that is vital because it reinvigorates the body, mind and spirit.