Seminar Curriculum

The intensive seminar will:

• Introduce a variety of mindfulness/ awareness–based meditation practices and related exercises;
• Explore contemplative methods for the higher education classroom;
• Discuss how to integrate contemplative practices into curriculum and classroom pedagogy in a variety of academic disciplines;
• Tailor contemplative strategies to meet participants’ individual and curricular needs;
• Consider contemplative applications for nonsectarian higher education.

Tuition, Meals and Housing

Participant tuition for the five-day program is $400. This cost includes daily catered lunches, a welcoming barbecue, a celebration dinner and daily morning and afternoon coffee, tea and snacks.

A $100 tuition deposit is due May 15, 2009. The balance is due at registration on July 29, 2009.

Apart from the meals listed above that are provided by the seminar, participants are responsible for their own meals. (Limited cooking facilities are available in each Naropa Snow Lion apartment, one of the available housing options.)

Housing is to be arranged by participants. Naropa will be offering discounted housing options for participants. To be announced later. All these apartments and hotels will be within walking distance of the Arapahoe Campus.

Travel costs will be covered by participants.

Tuition Scholarships

Naropa University, through funding from the Lenz Foundation, is awarding a limited number of full tuition scholarships ($400), which include some of the meal costs for the seminar.

Application for these can be completed on the regular application form and are due on April 1, 2009.

Testimonials

The following are comments and testimonials from the 2008 Contemplative Pedagogy Seminar:

The steady presence of the Naropa faculty was powerful, supportive, serious, and gentle.

All the meditation activities, but especially the strong focus on lovingkindness – very effective, fresh, and essential. I was skeptical about movement exercises, but they surprised me and were enjoyable and powerful, especially in building community. The schedule was perfect. At first it seemed like too much open space, but that space was one of the most valuable elements of the seminar, allowing for interaction, reflections, and consolidation. Even the walks were contemplative. It all added up to an extremely powerful session, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.

This was the most amazing seminar in terms of flow and pace. It seemed almost a natural pace, unhurried, with time for everyone to come back to the group. Perfect.

I have wanted for some time to find a path through my professional life that is personally congruent with my core values. I have sensed, experienced, and learned here at Naropa what this could possibly look like. I KNOW now the benefits that deepening my personal practice will have and I believe that my practices in my classroom will grow naturally from that. After over 20 years of teaching I had lost my way, but I've found a path and resources to help me back on track.

It has helped me come to important personal realizations about my personal and my classroom practice. Professionally and personally, I've made some strong connections with others, and I feel that my classroom practice has finally received the time, attention, and honesty it needed.

I feel a much stronger sense of the shape I'd like my personal practice to take. On the professional side, I feel as if I've been given some powerful new tools that I look forward to trying out. I am grateful to have met people with whom I can share ideas about how to use the tools – the personal connections are certainly part of what I've gained.

Although not a Tibetan practitioner, I appreciate the strand of Tibetan Buddhist Theory and practice that ran like an undercurrent in the seminar. Never preachy or always overt, it provided a sense of foundation and continuity that I haven't found elsewhere. This was the best seminar/retreat I've been to. I'm full of gratitude for all you gave me.

I really appreciate the way this was done – in a warm, welcoming, open style with well-versed instructors who all participated in the activities. I always felt like a peer and a colleague and never felt talked down to. Thank you so very much for offering this. It has been quite a rewarding experience!

Having teachers who have experienced and continue to experience the same challenges we are here to learn how to cope with, makes a lot of difference – your sense of integrity permeated the whole workshop, and you were very successful in instilling in participants the sense that contemplative pedagogy is not just a set of tools, but a way of being. Thank you

The following are comments and testimonials from the 2007 Contemplative pedagogy Seminar:

"I participate in—and organize—many pedagogy workshops, but the Naropa Seminar was among the best organized and executed, and was the most deeply transformative, that I have ever attended…”

“What Naropa offered so powerfully in its Seminar were pedagogical paradigms and practices honed in a context where mindfulness is the norm rather than the exception, and taken much deeper because of this; we learned techniques from masters, but more than this we witnessed in Naropa faculty the kinds of teachers and learners one can become through an unabashedly and consistently contemplative approach to education. This was profoundly inspiring, and convinces me that Naropa University is in a singularly privileged position to model and share contemplative approaches to education with broader higher education communities…

“The faculty were relaxed and held their roles lightly, but at the same time were deliberate and precise in the trajectory they moved us along, and in the rationale for each step of the path. In their attention to beginning, middle, and end, and in the exquisite balance struck between organization and spontaneity, the faculty offered an object lesson in contemplative teaching…

“The provision in the design of the Seminar for continued mentorship into the academic year is brilliant. I think of the analogy with meditation retreats, where practitioners can be uplifted and inspired, yet where this sense of possibility is always at risk of being washed away by the habits and busyness of post-retreat life.”

—David Kahane, Vargo Distinguished Teaching Chair,
Department of Political Science, University of Alberta

See Also:

Seminar Curriculum
Coaching
Seminar Faculty
Seminar Application