Session Information
23 SES 12 B, To See is to Believe? The Shifting Constitution of Evidence in Educational Research, Policy and Practice
Symposium
Contribution
Since the turn of the millennium educational research has witnessed the emergence and proliferation of various discourses of mindfulness that highlight the benefits of meditation and other approaches for managing stress and emotional problems, as well as for promoting school achievement. Contemporary appropriations of mindfulness discourses in the educational field draw together heterogeneous historical trajectories of data and evidence. After elaborating the etymological and philosophical contexts that have imbued the terms data and evidence with varied inscriptions, the paper identifies two dominant traditions of invoking ‘evidence’ that are drawn together in mindfulness discourses in education. In the human sciences, these have typically been considered separate epistemological traditions, the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ forms of producing ‘data’. On the one hand, there are the approaches that rely on the visual imaging and discourses of neural imaging, brain localization, and neuroplasticity to argue for the benefits of meditation-as-mindfulness across different sites. On the other hand, there are the psychological and phenomenological discourses of ‘experience’ that locate phenomena such as contemplation in the experiences of ‘presence’, ‘flow’ and the like. The former third-person perspective relies upon historical trajectories that run from Cartesian rationality to scientific method and the empiricism attributed to the sensorium of ‘the body’, including ocularcentrism and its contestation. The latter first-person perspectives rely upon shared accounts, the technology of the transcript and more ‘qualitative’ data thought related to narration and storytelling. Treated together in mindfulness studies in education, the trajectories are today thought to point to universal, everyday experiences that teachers, parents and pupils alike can cultivate through specific practices. We trace the genealogy of these once-distinct strategies of data and evidence into their current configurations, identifying the recombinatorial potentials and limitations within contemporary mindfulness research in education.
References
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