Composition Forum 54, Summer 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/54/

Contemplative Course Design: Promoting Mindfulness and Academic Belonging Among Student Writers Labeled Institutionally Unprepared

Kristen Starkowski

Abstract: Student writers labeled “underprepared” by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term “underprepared” varies across institutional contexts, the designation commonly requires that students enroll in a developmental writing course, making it difficult for these students to feel confident in their work and academic abilities. In this article, I position mindfulness as a strategy instructors can use to nurture students’ emerging scholarly identities. After describing common teaching challenges and the role mindfulness might play in overcoming them, I share a sample course schedule and series of assignments for a first-year writing course that incorporates mindfulness practices, such as slow reading and deep listening. These exercises and assignments can help students develop unique voices and connections to course material, qualities that tend to translate to higher levels of student confidence in both the writing classroom and in the college environment more generally.

About five years ago, a Hechniger report indicated that 209 colleges and universities had enrolled half of their incoming student class in developmental courses, primarily in writing and math (Butrymowicz). These figures have increased since COVID-19 began, with the first wave of pandemic learners entering college classrooms without the foundational skills necessary to excel. For example, U.S. Department of Education data on the state of education post-pandemic revealed that standardized test scores in both reading and math dropped, the percentage of high school students with failing grades increased, and the number of students needing developmental courses at both two and four-year institutions grew dramatically (U.S. Dept. of Education 16, 21). Students labeled “underprepared” by colleges typically lack confidence in their academic abilities and struggle to see themselves as active participants in the classroom or as students who belong in higher education. These are the students I have been working closely with for several years as an instructor of developmental-writing courses at Princeton and Harvard, and the exercises that I suggest in this article are ones that I have found successful in these contexts. While “underprepared” does not describe the same kind of student at every institution, in my experience it can describe a range of challenges that students and instructors might encounter in various educational environments, including difficulty translating complex ideas to the page, trouble sustaining long arguments, and lack of experience conceptualizing original interpretive insights.

Given this focus on deficits, how can instructors help students work from an asset-based mindset? How can we help student writers understand that their academic perspectives matter? Research shows that undergraduates enrolled in developmental writing courses perceive that their peers are more prepared for college and for the demands of academic writing than they are. As a result, many students taking developmental courses struggle to complete these courses, especially at two-year institutions (Yadusky). While summer bridge programs have proven effective at fostering senses of academic belonging among cohorts of students labeled underprepared (Suzuki), these students still tend to feel less at home in college environments, interacting with faculty and pursuing independent research opportunities less frequently than their peers (Lohfink). I’d like to position mindfulness as another strategy—distinct from or in addition to bridge programs—that can help foster a sense of academic identity among this growing population of learners in ways that can translate to better learning and retention.

Mindfulness allows those who practice it to reorient our bodies and minds through stillness, listening, creative expression, and movement. These practices can easily be applied to a pedagogical context—one invested in educating the whole student and that trains students to see that their perspectives matter. I see mindful learning as the practice of attending fully to an object of study or the immediate environment, which leads to a deeper awareness of one’s individual response to course material. Because a pedagogy rooted in mindfulness can motivate students to think deeply and introspectively about course material and to reflect on that material in relation to their own lives, these instructional techniques can help students to see themselves as scholars. I’d like to suggest that this approach to teaching can be especially impactful for student writers labeled underprepared. Language surrounding these students often reinforces narratives of deficit, a stereotype that mindful learning can challenge by empowering students to build rich personal and intellectual connections to course content.

Throughout this article, I share approaches to mindful course design that I have found generative in fostering academic belonging among my students in the first-year writing classroom. For example, student writers labeled underprepared regularly indicate that participation is one of the most significant hurdles of their college experience, but deep listening exercises and insight meditations and freewrites can help students make connections between class material and their own lives in ways that render forms of classroom engagement more transparent. Relatedly, students labeled underprepared often report difficulty digesting course readings, but mindful reading practices—similar to what Thomas Newkirk calls “slow reading” (2)—trains students to attend to texts with newfound presence. By sharing a range of class activities and assignments rooted in contemplative traditions—from relational dialogue building activities to projects based on transformative learning—I frame mindfulness as a form of student-centered pedagogy that can inspire an increased sense of academic belonging among students labeled institutionally underprepared, while creating room for multiple voices and diverse responses to course curricula.

Common Teaching Challenges and the Role of Mindfulness

Below, I describe some teaching challenges that writing instructors routinely encounter, and later identify in-class exercises and pedagogical techniques rooted in mindfulness that can help support student learning in these situations.

Challenge #1: Maintaining Focus and Attention

Quieting a racing mind or a body that itches to move can be difficult—especially when students are confined to the classroom for hours on end per day. But since writing and learning are embodied processes, courses can be designed to enable different forms of movement. I find that it is helpful to divide class sessions into a few 15 to 20-minute segments, as research in educational psychology indicates that an average college student’s attention span maxes out after about fifteen minutes on a single topic (McKeachie). Shifting tasks every fifteen minutes maximizes presence during any given task. For example, students may begin the class by working with a pair to identify important key terms in a reading, and then we might reconvene as a group to share the key terms that each pair identified. After doing so, we might have a large group discussion about which key terms are most central to the argument, before breaking out into individual work time, focused on applying one of those key terms to an emerging argument related to an upcoming essay assignment. These forms of active learning are clearly interconnected, but instructors can separate them in a way that encourages students to redirect their attention multiple times throughout the class—from speaking with a peer to moving about the classroom by jotting key terms on the whiteboard to working independently.

Challenge #2: Disengaging with Readings

Composition instructors routinely find that students struggle to keep up with or fully engage with assigned reading—even as the reading load tends to be much lighter in writing courses than in other seminar environments. This kind of disengagement can result from difficulties with time management, but also from the fact that students often do not know how to read for college courses. In high school, students tend to be rewarded for completing the reading and comprehending it—in college, we’re asking students to engage with reading in quite a different way.

In order to promote deeper engagement with course readings, it can be helpful to discuss the purpose of the reading with students before assigning it. Contextualizing the reading in terms of the larger goals of the unit or the sequence of lessons to come allows students to attend to what matters about the reading. At my institution, it is not uncommon for instructors to assign reading notes, comprised of questions that guide students through the text. In my sections, completion of these notes is part of a student’s course participation grade. Other instructors provide these notes to students, but they do not always collect or grade them, framing them as optional guides.

Examples of reading notes questions include versions of the following:

• Where does the writer explain the question or problem s/he is investigating? Why is that problem important?

• The authors of this reading propose several claims throughout the essay in response to that problem. What claim do you see as the main one? How do some of the smaller claims relate to this bigger claim?

• What language does the writer use to convince readers? What key terms or concepts make up the central argument?

• How would you describe the writer’s audience?

• Try to find two moments when the writer acknowledges the viewpoint of those who might disagree with the central claim.

• Identify one example or piece of evidence that you found convincing. Next, identify another example or piece of evidence that you found confusing or puzzling.

• Divide the text up into sections, ideally thematically, but you can use the section headings from the text to guide you. Write down the main points and function of each section in terms of the larger argument of the text.

• What next steps does the writer propose by the end of the article? Why might this course of action be important?

This list is not exhaustive. It is also clearly generalized so as to be adaptable for use with a range of texts. But the value of such a low-stakes exercise is clear: students often crave guidance on how to interact with course readings, especially any that feel dense. Reading notes can help students slow down, pay close attention, and master the process of working through a text’s language, structure, and central claims before they arrive to class.

Challenge #3: Silence and Stillness in the Classroom

It is no secret that most instructors dread silence in the classroom. Because we associate active learning with noise and motion, we equate silence with disinterest in the class material or with disengagement from the day’s lesson. While research on the pedagogical value of silence is not new (see Glenn, Zembylas, and Ollin), it can be difficult to create space for silence and stillness in the classroom in ways that feel comfortable for both students and the instructor. In what follows, I provide a list of activities rooted in silence that can be integrated into existing lesson plans:

• For the most part, the anxiety that both students and instructors feel when we encounter silence in the classroom is a result of the fact that those in the room do not know how long the silent period will last. Comments like “take a few minutes to think about this question before we regroup” can go a long way in making silence in the classroom a less stressful experience for all involved.

• Give students time to work independently in between activities—to apply the material introduced. Try to outline the goals of the exercise before students begin so that it is not necessary to interrupt students to provide further directions during the activity.

• Encourage students to workshop material on a class Google document on their own before reporting back to the group.

• Incorporate periodic listening exercises into classroom activities that help students attend to what another speaker has to say. These exercises can be done with classmates or even online videos. The goal is simply to invite students to devote themselves entirely to receiving what another person has to say, similar to the deep listening activity explained later.

• Offer students opportunities for non-verbal participation, such as being the “scribe” for a group activity or posting a comment to a class discussion thread that the instructor projects onto the board throughout class.

Teaching challenges associated with disengagement and silence arise when students see themselves as consumers of knowledge, rather than creators of it. Before college, most students—but especially students labeled underprepared—were not encouraged to be active participants in their learning. Mindfulness practices can create space for students to generate their own ideas in ways that allow them to build upon their lived experiences, facilitating the kind of self-reflection that can be a platform for deeper learning and engagement with class material.

Mindfulness Practices that Can Address These Teaching Challenges

In what follows, I introduce in-class activities that instructors can implement to familiarize students with mindful learning. The goal of these scaffolded exercises is to encourage students to focus on the process of writing, not necessarily on the end product, but also become more confident in themselves as scholars and in their work in the process.

Exercise #1: Slow Reading

Reading mindfully involves deliberately slowing down our reading speed, with the goal of immersing ourselves more deeply in a text so that we notice more about it. Most of us read with a goal in mind: to answer a question, to discern an argument, to locate evidence. Sometimes, we read passively by skimming or multi-tasking, preventing us from fully being present with the text. However, reading efficiently and passively often means sacrificing content or the opportunity for an original interpretive insight.

Students in the first-year writing classroom often express an interest in developing both reading skills and writing skills, particularly as they recognize the difficulty of digesting denser, heavier, and more complex reading loads—as described in the second teaching challenge mentioned above. We live in a society that rewards students for reading quickly—whether they’re taking a standardized test or trying to finish a lengthy novel in between problem sets. Mindful reading disrupts this instinct to digest a text as efficiently as possible. Thomas Newkirk coined one form of mindful reading: “slow reading” (2). I’d like to suggest that by combining “slow reading” with lessons on critical and active reading, instructors can model how to approach texts with an attentiveness that better prepares students for the writing process. But what does slow reading look like in practice?

Slow reading is a lot like close reading, but it places more emphasis on a reader’s unique entry point into the text. It requires attempting to discern the “center” of the text and balancing a text’s overall meaning with interpretations of small details and local elements that make up the text’s overall meaning. For most first-year students, it will be reassuring to realize that “readers [can] find their own entry points to a piece of writing” through the act of slow reading (Newkirk 117). The details that one student notices will not be the same details that another student notices. The connections that one student forms will not be the same ones that another student forms. This is because every reader is coming to the text with different experiences and assumptions. These experiences and assumptions are the very foundation of a slow reading, which understands first impressions and personal frameworks as essential to the development of an original argument.

Slow reading requires being open to surprise. Making sense of one’s initial reactions can be a reason for writing. As such, here is an exercise that I often circulate to students early on in a semester-long first-year writing class. The exercise can take anywhere from 15-30 minutes, and I often have students practice with a brief excerpt of a text—something about 3 to 4 pages long, so that they take their time as they read, but also find a few points of entry into the text.

1. Read through the annotations that you wrote on the text for homework.

2. Create a list of moments that you found surprising, puzzling, or confusing. You might also think about moments that were intriguing for reasons that you just can’t quite explain yet.

3. Reflect on whether any of your annotations derive from prior knowledge. Do any patterns or puzzles connect to a personal interest or past experience? Are you more invested in one puzzle compared to the others?

4. Select one puzzling moment to focus on, and think about how that moment links back to a central theme or aspect of the text. In other words, you are trying to connect the local and the global here. Be prepared to share your thoughts, but it is entirely okay if these thoughts are still in formation at the end of the exercise!

When guiding students through this exercise, I remind them that the moments that intrigue, surprise, or interest us as readers are often ones that resonate for a personal reason. However, when we read quickly, it is more difficult to connect with a text, which is why I ask students to complete this exercise by spending more time with each sentence on the page than they normally would. I have also found that students are most engaged when they see an argument forming as an extension of their unique experiences and worldviews. Slow reading challenges our instinct to absorb a text as quickly as possible; in doing so, it helps attune students to the intricacies of a text and to the stakes of an argument, making it easier for them to imagine their insights about small details as part of a wider conversation—one that they can contribute to and keep developing because it is both personally and intellectually meaningful.

Exercise #2: Deep Listening and Mindful Discussion

In contemplative practice, deep listening involves suspending the self in the interest of being truly present in the moment. Such meditative practices involve creating distance from the impulse to retreat from situations at hand. Sociologist Erving Goffman calls this urge to turn inward as a form of “getting away” without going away—a form of inattention so routine we almost don’t notice it (69). If we’ve learned anything in the four years that COVID has impacted our courses and lives, it’s that we all arrive to class with different challenges and demands on our attention, making it all too tempting to slip away from the conversation at hand (just for a moment) to check an email, book an appointment online, or add a task to our to-do list. These realities may be at the heart of first challenge I described at the beginning of this article. Mindfulness practices, especially deep listening, can help facilitate concentration despite the many distractions that compete for our attention every day.

Most deep listening exercises involve two people taking turns sharing experiences: the goal is not to respond, but rather to affirm the other person’s response. These listening exercises can be easily incorporated into classroom environments. Instinctively, students, like most of us, listen to others with an ear toward identifying the right moment to voice an original thought. Deep listening re-trains how we orient ourselves to others amid conversation, putting the emphasis less on sharing one’s own ideas, and more on summarizing and synthesizing the emerging ideas that another person has shared.

These exercises are easy to implement at different stages of the semester. For example, on the first day, an instructor might ask students to pair up, with each student introducing themselves to their partner, but listening intently so that they can introduce the other student to the class as a whole. Other ways of promoting deep listening in class discussions include encouraging students to acknowledge what the student before them said in order to frame their own point, or inviting other students to explain or expand on a question or remark that a previous student mentioned. These are moves usually adopted by instructors, but they can be re-directed at students—i.e. “Sam made a great point about the role of transitions just now. Can anyone explain what they took away from the comment and how they might apply it to their own work in progress?”

When it comes to mindful discussion, I have found that students are usually surprised to have conversations about how to participate in discussions. The urge to plan out what you are about to say while another person is speaking is, of course, almost impossible to suppress entirely, but it may also be a result of the fact that students are often unaware that there are other ways to advance a class discussion beyond simply raising a new thought, so they find themselves endlessly rehearsing new thoughts in their heads. I find it helpful to introduce students to strategies for participating in class discussions; all of these strategies frame deep listening as the step before the articulation of a thought. On a PowerPoint slide, I categorize forms of verbal participation, which include emphasizing a different aspect of another student’s insight, posing questions for the class based on aspects of the discussion at hand, sharing a contrasting viewpoint, pointing the class toward new evidence, making connections between course material and topics of conversation in previous classes, or synthesizing multiple classmates’ comments by pointing out a common thread between all of them. Many of my colleagues include a similar lesson in their curriculum; instructors can even gamify the lesson by asking students to select different “conversation moves” from a hat and try them out throughout the course of a class session.

Deep listening is a conversational practice, but it is one that transitions well into units on summary and paraphrase. The ability to accurately represent the views of another scholar is an important skill for any essay task that requires synthesizing sources in the service of generating an original argument; but it is often the case that students find themselves so concerned with identifying and defending a strong thesis statement that they forget the importance of framing their ideas in terms of the ideas of others. Deep listening exercises therefore prepare students to do verbally what they’ll later need to do in their own writing—understand and summarize what someone else has said.

Once we get to the point in the semester where we have completed a few deep listening exercises, I try to encourage students to apply the same skills to summarizing and paraphrasing sources of different kinds—a magazine article, a scientific research report, and a case study. The work that we do in this unit of the curriculum prepares students to position their own claims in relation to careful but concise summaries of scholarly sources before writing a research paper.

Exercise #3: Freewriting or Producing a “Zero Draft”

Many composition instructors already encourage freewriting within their classrooms to invite students to formulate thoughts before discussions or workshops on a given topic, which can be one form of incorporating silence into the classroom. In academic circles, writers often talk about the value of “zero drafting,” which similarly involves putting first impressions onto the page without consideration of argument or structure. The goal of these forms of writing is idea formation, which is a stage of the writing process that underprepared students regularly find most challenging. Writers spend a specific amount of time, anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, jotting down any idea they have in mind related to their writing project. In practice, this might involve looking back at notes or annotations and generating a bulleted list of possible avenues for further inquiry. The goal is to record all ideas in formation in one place. Once these ideas are on the page, the writer can isolate the most promising insights and possibly connect some of these ideas in order to arrive at a preliminary thesis or research question. As a class exercise, this activity might involve what I describe below:

1. Ask students to write continuously for 15-20 minutes. Some instructors may choose to provide a prompt for students to respond to; others might ask students to write on a topic of personal interest to them.

2. During this time, students can write sentences, paragraphs, or organize thoughts as a bulleted list of points. Students might also choose to refer back to class notes or annotations on reading material.

3. At the end of the drafting period, ask students to highlight 2-3 of the most promising ideas that they generated while freewriting. Are there any ways that the writer can connect these ideas?

4. Encourage them to speak with the person next to them about the idea that they are most excited about to try to develop this idea one step further—either by complicating it, planning out ways to extend or apply it, or by discussing possible evidence that the writer can use to establish the emerging claim that they are noticing.

Exercise #4: Gaipa Cartoons

Mark Gaipa’s article, Breaking into the Conversation: How Students Can Acquire Authority for their Writing has become a staple of my composition curriculum. The article offers an overview of how students can showcase writerly authority by introducing a ballroom metaphor; in Gaipa’s article “criticism as conversation” comes alive through drawings of stick figure cartoons, each representative of an individual weighing in on intellectual debates about Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (422). Gaipa’s cartoons describe strategies for intervening in scholarly discourses ranging from “Picking a Fight” by challenging the claims of a specific critic to “Crossbreeding the Conversation with Something New” by analyzing primary material in light of a new theory or framework (427, 432). I regularly assign the article for homework before asking students to create their own cartoons in class.

Drawing has long been understood as a tool of contemplative practice and vehicle for knowledge formation. In the contemplative tradition, the slowness of the act focuses the mind, allowing the individual to let go of distractions and attend to the activity at hand. In my composition classroom, I invite students to imitate and adapt Gaipa’s stick figure cartoons with their own preliminary thesis statements in mind. It is often the case that students discover new ideas in the process of drawing their thoughts—even generating stick figure cartoons takes time, which gives students the space to form new insights during the exercise. For most of the students, visualizing and communicating an emerging insight in this form results in a more specific and refined argument.

Exercise #5: Learning Transfer

Students often struggle to imagine how the work that they are doing in the writing classroom will translate to other contexts; they find it difficult to see how a project that might be personally and intellectually engaging in one classroom environment will help them in another. But for the sake of promoting academic identity and belonging, it is important to give students an opportunity to reflect on the skills and strategies that they can carry across contexts. Transfer is an academic subfield in its own right, but I find that the metacognitive processes that transfer scholarship emphasizes promote similar moves of introspection and reflection associated with contemplative pedagogy. Contemplative exercises like the ones I have described earlier in this article offer students opportunities to identify their frames of references and what they value in their education. As humans, we take meaning-making processes for granted, and contemplative practices can help us understand how we are approaching and evaluating the world around us. These are exercises that can help enhance student focus and investment in course material by inviting students to think about how the work they are doing complements their future academic and professional ambitions.

With these goals in mind, I spend part of the last class of each semester facilitating a conversation about transfer. In preparation for this class session, I invite students to share an assignment or the details of a writing task that they have had to do for another course, for work, or in a setting that is meaningful to them. What kinds of writing do they encounter in these spaces? What kinds of skills are important? During class, I ask students to share the writing tasks that they’ve brought in from other contexts with their peers. I’ve seen everything from an artist’s statement for a Painting & Drawing course to a memo for an internship at a nonprofit. The activity gives students a chance to think about how they will adapt or adjust certain writing skills to suit the context that interests them most, but it also exposes them to a range of writing tasks from different disciplines and industries that they may encounter at other points in their academic or professional journey, even if a peer’s path isn’t their primary interest at the time.

Contemplative Course and Assignment Design

With these in-class activities in mind, I have included a sample course schedule and series of assignments for a first-year writing course that incorporates mindfulness practices. I imagine this course schedule and series of assignments as a flexible template, one that instructors can tailor with existing units and lesson plans in mind.

Week	Topics, Activities, and Assignments
Week 1:	Introduction; Your Relationship with Writing; Writer’s Letter
Week 2:	The Reading Methods: Active Reading, Slow Reading, and Close Reading
Week 3:	Participation Strategies; Deep Listening Exercises; Initial Impressions of Readings
Week 4:	Summary & Paraphrase—Representing Other Thinkers
Week 5:	Noticing Puzzles and Tensions; Forming Critical Questions
Week 6:	Writing and Workshopping Zero Drafts
Week 7:	Understanding and Working with Sources; Methods of Intervening; Drawing Gaipa Cartoons
Week 8:	Writing as a Conversation—Framing the Scholarly Discourse
Week 9:	Understanding Your Writing Habits
Week 10:	Writing Process Exercises; Self-Assessment
Week 11:	Introduction to Counterargument
Week 12:	Revision Workshop
Week 13:	Academic Style & Expression; Refining Your Scholarly Voice at the Sentence Level
Week 14:	Introduction to the Capstone; Learning Transfer Exercises
Week 15:	Capstone Presentations

Assignment #1: Writer’s Letter

In my department, it is common for instructors to ask students to write a letter during the first week of the semester. The letter gives students a chance to introduce themselves to the instructor and mention any concerns that they have about the course, but it is also an opportunity for students to reflect on their personal relationship with writing.

In these letters, I ask students to describe their previous experiences with writing. Most of them share details about various essays and projects that they have completed in the past. For many students, the writer’s letter becomes a reason to make sense of writing tasks that have been challenging for them, but also to reflect on tasks that have been meaningful and memorable. In my class, the writer’s letter is an ungraded, low-stakes assignment that, I hope, helps students recognize the experiences and background knowledge that they are bringing to the table over the course of the semester. The assignment cultivates a stronger sense of intention, allowing students to formulate goals before the semester begins that translates to a deeper connection to course material.

Assignment #2: Self-Observation—Understanding Writing Habits

As I’ve already explained earlier in this article, writing is an embodied process, so activities based on self-observation can be especially helpful in guiding students toward an understanding of themselves as writers. We rarely have an occasion to think critically about our own writing habits and processes, so I try to create such an occasion in the form of the following assignment.

Assignments based on self-observation and experimentation are already common in the social sciences. For example, in a course on the psychology of social media, an instructor might ask students to monitor their screen time for a week to become aware of patterns of usage and new ways of understanding their relationship to technology. Similarly, in a sociology class, an instructor might ask students to observe their own instincts at a dining hall or in another public location and reflect on the norms governing interactions in those settings. The goal of these assignments is to position students as observers of their own behaviors, such that they become more mindful about the ways that they interact with people and objects within their social worlds.

I organize a weekly writing table in the dining hall at Harvard, and I often find that students come to me with questions about my writing process. Students sign up for writing table hoping that drafting or revising a paper might be a little bit easier if they change their process. We usually spend these sessions talking about students’ writing routines, and I send them off with strategies to try as they attempt to establish a routine that works for them.

Mindful reflections about one’s places and body while writing can be a quick but important early assignment in any writing class. Ask students to write in a variety of settings—in the dining hall, at a café, the in library—and pay attention to their practices and experiences in those settings. Students can also experiment with writing as music or white noise is playing, or they can try writing at different times of the day. I encourage students to think about the space around them—do they find writing more manageable when they have the readings in front of them, notes on a document, or sticky notes beside them? It can be hard to know ideal writing conditions and to craft a plan for making these conditions possible without experimenting with different approaches to writing. I will be the first to admit to them that it took me several semesters of café and classroom hopping as an undergraduate to discover the routine that I continue to implement today.

I usually ask students to experiment with different writing environments and routines over the course of a week, and for at least three different writing sessions during that week. At the end of the process, I ask students to reflect on their writing routines and ideal writing conditions. Do they plan to adjust their writing process in any way based on the results of their observations?

Assignment #3: Transformative Learning

Capstone assignments can be apt opportunities for promoting the kind of “whole student” learning associated with contemplative pedagogy. We all know that students are often motivated by grades rather than the learning experience itself. One way to promote transfer and meaning beyond grades is to offer a capstone experience that encourages students to relate course content to their everyday lives. While this kind of assignment could take many forms—a presentation, a multimedia project, or a portfolio—I offer one example here of a capstone experience designed with this goal in mind.

In various first-year writing courses, I’ve assigned a capstone assignment that asks students to communicate something they’ve learned over the course of the semester—whether from their research paper or another essay—in a different genre. I invite students to imagine a non-academic audience for the project—a community of personal significance. Students create all sorts of projects, from podcasts to paintings to poems. The bigger challenge, though, is for the students to translate a concept or new idea in a way that makes sense for the community of focus, whether that audience is their family, a religious group, or a volunteer organization. This kind of assignment fosters a sense of academic authority since students need to be experts on the topic—a topic that arises out of their research and writing process—but it also creates space for students to connect what they are learning in the classroom to their personal values and identities.

Conclusion: The Value of the Non-Prescriptive

Recent shifts in higher education—exacerbated by the pandemic—have resulted in an increase in the number of students considered institutionally “underprepared” in college classrooms. These developments point to a need to support this student population and to address the pressures that they face by focusing on the individual backgrounds and experiences that these students bring to our classrooms. While many studies have suggested the benefits of interventions outside of the classroom, in this article, I’ve introduced ways of increasing academic belonging among students in the classroom through contemplative course design, with a focus on mindfulness. The contemplative tradition prioritizes the whole person and sees individual connection with course material as instrumental for knowledge formation. Such an approach to pedagogy can therefore help students cultivate distinct voices and writerly authority, qualities that tend to translate to higher levels of student confidence in both the writing classroom and in the college environment more generally.

As I share these assignments and practices, though, I am aware of a central irony—the fact that any kind of template for teaching mindfully may actually impede mindful teaching. No classroom will benefit from recyclable mindful learning and writing practices because contemplative teaching requires sensitivity to the unbidden, collaborative lesson planning, and attention to the unique dynamics of our courses. My approach here is, by design, overly prescriptive. That is because my hope is to share a vision for building contemplative practices into composition courses, with the recognition that there are of course many ways of going about promoting the kind of deep engagement and critical thinking that these exercises and assignments encourage. This kind of effort starts with the students. Our goal is, after all, to cultivate a writing and learning environment that enables students to see themselves as scholars by drawing on their unique worldviews and experiences. At stake here is a transformation of mindset, one that can foster an enhanced sense of academic belonging, but these transformations take time and will require explanations of unconventional practices like slow reading or zero drafting—approaches that may very well work for some students but not others. In mindfully approaching this advice, then, I encourage readers to make peace with playfulness—to experiment with these strategies and templates, invite students to deviate from them, and remain open to the intellectual possibilities that student-driven reflection and critical inquiry might bring into being.

Works Cited

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