Faculty Learning Communities

Sustainability Reflective & Contemplative Practices 2020-2021

“When we engage students with complex, daunting global issues, how can reflective and contemplative practices support students’ learning and emotional wellbeing?”

This question brought together a faculty learning community on Sustainability and Contemplative Practice, which has been meeting since 2009 in occasional meetings and retreats as well as via an online group.

With support and leadership from both Curriculum for the Bioregion and the Whidbey Institute, the Sustainability and Contemplative Practice faculty learning community came together out of a felt need to share inquiry through reflection, contemplation, listening, and dialogue as an important dimension of response to our environmental crisis. We also wanted to explore how these same modes of inquiry might be meaningfully included in classroom teaching that focuses on sustainability and environmental justice.

The group’s Sustainability and Contemplative Practice conversations and shared writing led to a book, Contemplative Approaches to Sustainability in Higher Education, ed. Marie Eaton, Holly J. Hughes, and Jean MacGregor, published by Routledge in 2017.

We hope to convene face-to-face meetings once again when we are on the other side of the COVID-19 crisis. In the meantime, if you are interested in joining the Sustainability and Contemplative Practice online group (a Google group), please write Jean MacGregor, JeanMacG@protonmail.com.