Special Issue #08
Contemplation in Education and Human Development
In recent decades, Contemplative Studies has established practices including mindfulness and compassion to be legitimate subjects of academic inquiry. Much of the science and scholarship to date, however, has a developmental blind spot. Despite diversity in the age of participants studied, contemplative research has, by and large, not focused on the developmental characteristics (e.g., needs, capacities, life tasks) of individuals as critical to understanding their engagement with different contemplative practices and the impacts those practices have on different lines of human development (e.g., attentional, emotional, self). As a result, our existing knowledge base is largely adult-focused, non-developmental, and lacks intergenerational context, hindering developmentally appropriate evaluations of contemplative education approaches. Thus, our understanding of how positive qualities like focused attention, mindfulness, and compassion develop across the lifespan is limited by this blind spot.
Cover image credit: One 007, Kelvy Bird, 2008. Oil on canvas, 24 × 24 in. Reproduced with permission of the artist.