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

Creating Community as Contemplative Practice

Angela Muir

Abstract: In the pursuit of fostering vibrant and inclusive learning environments, this article explores how the practice of community-building can be a contemplative practice. Drawing upon personal experiences and pedagogical insights, Muir navigates the rewards of cultivating authentic connections among students while dismantling hierarchies within the classroom. Through reflective anecdotes and theoretical frameworks, this article underscores the significance of shared values, respecting diversity, and democratic engagement in shaping transformative learning communities. Emphasizing practices such as establishing common ground, engaging in creative expression, and co-constructing syllabi, the article advocates for a holistic approach to education that prioritizes empathy, agency, and reciprocity. By integrating the contemplative practice of community building into the fabric of academic discourse, Muir envisions a future where students and educators alike embrace interconnectedness, compassion, and collective growth.

To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.

— bell hooks

The first day of a new class always feels a bit precarious, but this first day was especially strange. Five weeks into the spring semester, I was asked to take over a First-Year Writing Seminar for a professor who left the university without warning. I suspected that the students might be resistant to me since they had likely formed bonds as a class and with their previous instructor. I was prepared to spend the first class hearing their concerns and working through the plan for the rest of the semester together. When I got to the classroom, however, I found the students sitting at their desks silently. No one was chatting. No one was even looking at a phone or a computer. They were just sitting in an awkward silence. I introduced myself, explained the situation, and asked them to tell me about themselves. As the class period moved on, it became clear that the students didn’t know each other. In Robert Yagelski’s book, Writing As A Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability, he talks about a collaborative writing project that took place at the National Writing Project. He says his ideal writing scenario is “1000 writers writing. Together” (165). I realized that in order even to get these 15 students writing together, I had first to build a community. I was then confronted with the question, what does it mean to build a community?

Since teaching this class, it has become clear to me that the act of creating a classroom community can and should be a contemplative practice. It requires attention, intention, and focus and is an act of profound relationship-building. According to the Contemplative Mind in Society, “Contemplative practices can help develop greater empathy and communication skills, improve focus and attention, reduce stress and enhance creativity, supporting a loving and compassionate approach to life,” they can transform your relationship with yourself, improve your relationship with others, and enrich your relationship with the world around you (Practices). These same things can be said about creating classroom communities, and actively participating in a community. In addition, having a healthy and intentional classroom community makes engaging with other types of contemplative pedagogies easier, as students tend to feel more comfortable with their peers if they feel that sense of belonging and mutual respect and care. As instructors, however, it is important not to take for granted that our classes are a community by default; rather, it is a practice.

Culturally, we often use the term “community” to represent a group of people with the same heritage or ethnic background, people gathered in a particular religious space, or sometimes even a faction of people who live within proximity to one another. In the field of rhetoric and composition, we often use the term “community” to define groups of people outside of academia that we engage with for research, writing, or service opportunities. Think “community literacy,” “community-engaged,” or even “service-learning.” We sometimes use it to describe a class we instruct, “classroom community” or “student community.” In each case, the term tends to describe a group of people but does not always reflect how the group interacts.

Being actively involved in a community and cultivating a thriving, supportive environment requires more than simply conforming to a predefined category. Because it is contemplative work, it is a practice. I had the privilege of being a part of an intentional yoga and meditation community for several years. Living in the community ashram taught me some of the principles of actively being a community member. The community hosted morning and afternoon meditations, nightly community dinners, and a garden for all members to enjoy. This was on top of the public services offered, including meditation training, yoga asana, philosophy classes, and regular opportunities for satsang, or gathering. Being a part of this community required participation and service, which included volunteering to cook or clean in the kitchen, supporting gardening or landscaping efforts, leading meditations, teaching classes, or being available to host visiting yogis. It was demanding. It was also incredibly rewarding.

In this type of community, neighbors are more like family than simply humans that share a wall. For example, one night, while cooking dinner, my husband realized we did not have an onion, a crucial part of my recipe. He sent a text to the community, and we had three onions on our doorstep within ten minutes! Or, another night, when I was home alone, I sliced open my thumb while peeling a potato. Realizing I was not stocked with first aid supplies, I walked into the center courtyard holding my bleeding thumb. Immediately, a neighbor came to help bandage me up and ensured I got back home ok.

These stories are meant to represent people who are a community because of their actions or practices, not simply their beliefs or proximity. As I reflect on how and why this community came to be harmonious in this way, I realize that it is because when we entered the community, we did not simply move into an apartment. We were welcomed in a manner that fostered relationships. We understood our common interest in meditation and yoga, but we also had respect for each other’s many differences and an understanding of the community’s democratic processes. This is not to say there was never conflict, but when there was conflict, we moved through it together. In other words, it was a non-hierarchical environment. It was also an environment that established safety and inspired meaningful engagement.

Historically, we have precedence for this type of profound community building within academia. Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal arts college in North Carolina from 1933-1957, established community building through its organizational, collaborative, and pedagogical practices. Black Mountain shows us that service and collaboration within academia’s walls are crucial to building a productive democratic community. It presents a model where traditional academic hierarchies are reconfigured to prioritize learning over power dynamics. At Black Mountain, students worked with faculty to build the structures that became classrooms and housing. They planted and harvested the food they would eventually use in the kitchen. They shared the responsibility of cooking and serving meals or cleaning the mess hall alongside the faculty. Everyone was involved in the running of the community, centralizing a service mindset. Beyond this, they prioritized student agency in the curriculum design and contemplative pedagogical practices. This resituating of power enabled students and faculty to support one another’s learning and development while creating citizens ripe for action “in the real world.”

I offer Black Mountain as an example because its focus on community created a legacy that rippled out for decades, influencing both writing and arts communities such as the Beats, the abstract expressionists, and many others, all of which can be defined by activism and human-centric principles. Could this combination of community and contemplative values be considered a model for contemporary academia, especially considering the turmoil we currently find ourselves in? As Paula Mathieu and I discuss in our article, “Contemplative Pedagogy for Health and Well-Being in a Trauma-Filled World,” mental health struggles and disengagement are on the rise for both students and instructors. In order to move forward productively, we need to start interacting as human beings, being fully present as bodies and “not just brains on a stick” (Uhl and Stuchul 16). In a world where tension and trauma have become so central, we need our communities for support and stability.

As research has already developed, contemplative practices are proven to profoundly impact our relationships with one another by encouraging gratitude, an attitude of loving-kindness, and supporting social connection based in empathy (Barbezat and Bush). Oftentimes, we view these practices as individual ones, experiences where we have an opportunity to mindfully “examine one’s experiences and thoughts” (Barbezat and Bush 22). However, if the students are guided to see their “outer world” as one that fundamentally includes the others in the classroom, and their “inner world” as one that centers loving kindness and compassion for both them and their classmates, then we have guided them to establish themselves within a community-centric framework. Contemplative activities such as fostering a healthy classroom community can not only improve the overall course experience but also provide our students with tools for developing relationships and communities outside of the classroom.

With this in mind, my contemplative approach to classroom community building involves three principles:

1. Recognizing each other’s humanity through discussing our common bonds;
2. Fostering respect and appreciation for our individuality and differences, which includes acceptance and self-love; and
3. Cultivating student agency through radical democracy.

We cannot assume that our classroom is a community just because we are all in one place at the same time. We also cannot assume that our classroom is a community because we are all there for the same reasons. It is our job as instructors to help define what it means to be in a community by giving the students an opportunity to find shared values and define our norms, creatively interact and reflect together, cultivate opportunities to serve one another and form a democratic system of operation. All of this should be done in the spirit of contemplative practice. That is, students are encouraged to explore their inner lives without being compelled to embrace any ideology or specific belief.

The contemplative community-building activities that I am about to offer are meant to support students in having a deeper understanding of one another and themselves, to encourage connection and compassion within the classroom, and to find meaning in their work and the work of their peers. As Yagelski suggests, this moves student writers to consider that we are a “complex network of beings who are inherently interconnected and inextricably part of the ecosystems on which all life depends” (17). In other words, as writers, when we become more aware of ourselves and our connection with the world around us, our ability to write, exist, and experience compassion becomes available. Since much of community building happens in the very first moments of class, the following examples are foundational practices that can be offered to set expectations for the classroom community.

Establishing Common Ground

Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.

— Sara Ahmed

Culturally, we focus on celebrating our differences, uniqueness, and individuality. At a very young age, I remember trying to decide my favorite color, and feeling like it was a formative decision. I wanted to choose a color that represented something about who I was but was also different from what the other girls chose. Perhaps this was just a personality trait of mine, but establishing how I was different seemed to be of the utmost importance. Visually, we almost immediately notice our differences. Brown hair or blonde, blue or dark eyes, white or brown skin… these traits, which can be superficial, can also act as definitions. On the other hand, commonalities take some work to find, especially if we are looking beyond the surface. As I mentioned earlier, foundationally, communities are strengthened when members have a common bond, and “the orientations we have towards others shapes the contours of space by affecting relations of proximity and distance between bodies” (Ahmed 3). The two activities below support the establishment of these common denominators and, therefore, make the classroom space feel more open.

On the first day of both First-Year Writing Seminars and Advanced Writing in the Discipline courses, I begin with an activity called “Common Ground.” For lack of a better way to describe it, I set it up like “speed dating.” Splitting the class in half, one half stays seated, and the other half rotates. The students are asked to leave everything at their desks except a notepad and pen. Sitting across from one another, each pair has three minutes to find common ground. They are tasked with finding something beyond the superficial and obvious, so no physical features, course requirements, majors, age, or class standing. They need to dig deeper.

Before they begin, I remind them to practice mindful listening by being fully present with one another and letting go of any assumptions about what the other might bring to the table. The goal is to have an opening conversation. The students are reminded that in three minutes, they need to be careful not to interrupt one another, to “avoid letting your story take over their story,” and to “be curious as you listen” (Barbezat and Bush, 146-7). But they also need to move quickly, as the timer is ticking! I set the timer for three minutes, and the class erupts in excited chatter. Faces immediately light up as they discover similar interests, backgrounds, or even dreams, fears, and anxieties. The first conversation has a few moments of silence, but after the first round, the three minutes seem to go by fast, and students watch sadly as their new friend moves on to the next. At the same time, when they turn to their new partner, the fun starts all over again.

After each student has had the opportunity to interact, students return to their desks, and I ask them to reflect on their experiences. I prompt them, “Think about the interactions you just had. What surprised you? What did you learn? What are some of the commonalities you found among your classmates? Which ones are the most meaningful? How does this change the way you view this classroom space?” They have ten minutes to write a reflection and submit it via Canvas. Reading their responses after class is always a highlight. The students all seemed to be surprised by the connection they made and the depth of conversation that could happen in three minutes. Introverted students tended to recount their anxiety when the activity began, but they also reflected that the conversations were more seamless and natural than they expected. They also seem to all feel more connected, as if they have made a new friend. For first-year students, this can be a pillar of support in an already tense time.

We then move to establish “community norms” as a whole class. As Qianqian Zhang-Wu suggested in her 2022 BRAWN Summer Institute keynote speech, establishing community norms helps decenter the instructor. It implements an anti-racist approach to creating a healthy classroom community by allowing the members to determine the norms of operation within the classroom space. These norms are meant to address how we will interact, and conduct discussion, any rules or regulations they do or do not want to maintain, or any accommodations they would like to see as standard. I give the students examples of norms they might consider to get them started. Typically, they address speaking with respect, the class policy on food or technology, recording classes for missing students, and how we want to indicate that we have something to share. It always amazes me the considerations the students suddenly have for one another. For example, one student asked that we always start with a free write because she knew that an athlete was coming right from practice. She felt that this would help him to ease in rather than feel rushed. Another student requested that we have a “seventh inning stretch” because she and another classmate discussed that this was the last class of the day and it was hard to sit through such a long class period.

The common ground and community norms activities were first used in the class I discussed at the beginning of this article, but they were so successful that I continued to use them on the first day of class to establish an early connection among the students. In addition, I think it is important to pair these activities with one another. Combining these activities simulates the intentions of contemplative practice by allowing the students to go inward, reflect, and then move outward.

Celebrating Differences Through Artistic Engagement

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

— Alan Watts

I will always remember my favorite first day of class. It was Professor Jessica Pauszek’s, Cultural Rhetorics course during my Master's program at Boston College. Most of the time, on the first day of class, you move through introductions briefly, review the syllabus, maybe discuss a preliminary reading of some sort, and you are on your way. Everyone seems a bit in disarray from the abrupt start of the semester, and though we want to seem excited about the possibilities of the course, we are mostly just stressed about the intimidating list of assignments ahead of us. This first day was different.

Upon entering the classroom, Professor Pauszek set up two tables in the center, one full of snacks and the other full of craft materials: construction paper, magazines, glue sticks, scissors, markers, stickers, and so on. As a graduate student, I was initially put off and a bit confused. We began typically. She briefly introduced herself and the course at large, and then she stated the outrageous: we would not be discussing the syllabus! Instead, she asked us to help ourselves to snacks, and then instructed us to use the next twenty minutes to construct a visual representation of our writing process using the materials offered. She told us to socialize as we did this and talk to each other about our work as we created. The room sat hesitantly. No one wanted to be the first to get snacks or craft materials. With a little more encouragement, people began to shift to the center, which suddenly became a meeting place.

In the center of the room, we chatted while grabbing cookies and juice boxes. We connected over art materials and asked each other to borrow scissors or glue when another was done. I retrieved my own set of magazine clippings, paper, and glue and returned to my seat to get to work. As someone who considers herself an artist, I seamlessly retreated into myself. With an almost automatic demeanor, I created a collage in one fell swoop. I barely looked up… It wasn’t until a classmate approached me and commented that I remembered I was in a classroom.

“Woah, that is really interesting. Can you tell me about it?”

I smiled and looked down at the thing I had created. A sense of panic overcame me as I remembered the assignment was “to represent our writing process,” and I am not sure I was cognizant of that as I crafted it. But somehow, I began explaining: The flock of birds represented ideas or questions, the singular bird was the emergent topic, the closeup of the wing was my research, the city was context, and the window was my writer’s lens. Only a small part of the collage was “about me,” a picture of a cup of coffee and a cluster of disconnected eyes, lips, and hands, representing the embodied aspect of writing.

After I finished my verbal dissertation about my collage, I realized I had an audience. Several students had gathered around me to look, with their projects in hand. I then asked about their work, and each took turns showing their representations and explaining their writing process. This is where the magic happened. Everyone created something wildly different! One person had literally identified steps in the writing process and cut out letters to make words. Someone else created a visual list. Another person had a sort of map. Another drew a cartoon. The important thing about this activity is that we learned not only about our own writing process but also about each other’s. This moment of social comparison allowed us to recognize the differences in our processes and celebrate our individuality.

For me, this was a paramount discovery. I learned that I am an abstract thinker. In order to define my process, words and methods were not sufficient. This depiction was, in fact, my only successful attempt at defining my writing process. In addition, by realizing that I am not like others, and each person has their own unique way of approaching the contemplation of their process, I can better plan for my own future writing projects, while also adjusting the way I discuss writing processes in the First-Year Seminar I instruct.

When I asked Professor Pauszek about this activity, she explained that it was her take on an activity she was asked to do by Professor Neal Learner years earlier. Pauszek intended this activity to develop a community of learners before focusing on the syllabus and grading – something many students often find difficult. Her hope was to try and make the first activity a low-stakes but representative means of learning from each other, interacting, listening, and sharing personal experiences of writing. This activity, Pauszek noted, was also connected to her community literacy work with working-class writers, where every meeting has time devoted to sharing food and drink together, writing together, and moments sharing work with each other.

Throughout our semester, reflection was a key component of discussion and writing, but as I think about this moment, there are some key takeaways if we consider how this could also be a contemplative activity. For example, this activity is unique because it is an “indirect, metaphoric, contemplative approach” that can “reveal truth about a condition rather than a rational technique” (Barbezat and Bush, 117). Rather than using language to tell someone something, we worked through a self-discovery process through a more abstract method. It also allowed for moments of inward and outward reflection, which gave us an opportunity to understand how we see ourselves and how others see us. Finally, it bonded the group on the common ground of being a group of writers with unique and successful processes. As a group of advanced students, it was encouraging to see diversity and prosperity simultaneously. This established a center line for us to work from and with as the semester progressed, especially as we embarked on group projects, class discussions, and the always-vulnerable writing workshops. We aligned as a community of writers, invested in our own work and the work of our peers.

Working Together in a Radical Democracy

Another example comes from Noël Ingram, a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Boston College, who allows her First-Year Writing students to write the syllabus. Ok, well, not entirely, but she does allow them to determine the majority of the course reading list in an act of radical democracy. She calls it an “Assemblage of Knowledge.” This activity decenters the instructor and centralizes the student’s interests, giving them ownership over their learning experience. As Barbezat and Bush highlight, “contemplative practices place the students at the center of their own learning, shifting the balance of power in the classroom in a meaningful and engaged manner” (8). Not only does this shift that balance, but it also establishes trust in her students and supports building a classroom community through the syllabus.

Ingram begins the course with a few teacher-assigned readings, the introduction to Rachel Valentina González’s Quinceañera Style, and the prologue to The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. She uses these pieces to model rhetorical reading, as an introduction to the range of topics they might think about as part of this class, and as a way to speak about research. Most importantly, to discuss how research interests are an outgrowth of their identities and past experiences, and how they can use research as a form of self-discovery. For example, she shares with the class that, even though her own background is Irish Catholic, when she lived in Los Angeles she taught in communities where quinces—a celebration of a young girl's emergence into adulthood—dominated her tenth-grade students’ social lives. Attending a student’s quinceañera prompted her curiosity about this coming-of-age event and sparked her interest in the assigned text. Additionally, students read selections from Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, specifically the “situation poems.” They spoke about this work in the context of how choosing sources can influence the narrative one tells and how a narrative can be constructed through juxtaposing different pieces of evidence alone.

From there, Ingram informs them that in pairs, they will research, select, and pitch an article for the class to read. On her syllabus, she says, “Think about what you’re passionate about. What might you want to read this semester? What type of media do you want to explore? What social, cultural, and political issues are you interested in discussing as part of this class?” She gives the students the tools they need to find appropriate articles, develop an abstract of that article, and then pitch it to the class. Then, after the class has heard all of the article pitches during a class presentation, they vote on which articles they would like to read over the course of the semester.

Ingram found that “because students were co-constructors of the syllabus, this caused them to not only have more buy-in with the course overall but to feel a sense of commitment to each other. Not doing the reading that you know your friend selected and will be facilitating discussion on is a completely different dynamic than not doing a reading that your teacher assigned. There are power dynamics at play that influence the different affective obligations to engaging with reading when your professor assigns it versus one of your peers or friends.” In her student evaluations, the most common word was “freedom.” Students said that they felt free to “explore their own interests,” to be “creative,” and to Ingram, “that signals that I’ve been successful at fostering a classroom ecology that helps to support students’ sense of agency and self-efficacy over their learning and academic exploration.”

Radical democracy and contemplative practices at their heart lean into promoting experiential learning in the classroom. Together they ask the students to participate actively in the course, consider their peers as individuals, and reflect on their identity and position within the community. This self-reflection comes within the activity described above, but Ingram also asks her students to compose three metacognitive letters throughout the semester. These letters require the students to think deeply about and communicate their areas of strength and growth as writers, connecting their thoughts to the work they are doing in this course. The letter provides an opportunity to conduct a self-reflection and synthesize their learning in the course.

The other aspect of Ingram’s course to note is that it is distinctly anti-racist. Ingram decentralizes herself both in the required reading she assigns and the way she discusses her experience as a white woman, therefore prioritizing marginal voices both within and outside of her classroom. In her book, Teaching Community, bell hooks offers that, “forging a learning community that values wholeness over division, disassociation, splitting, the democratic educator works to create closeness” (49). This gives the students a “real” opportunity to practice participation in community building, hopefully resonating long after they leave higher education.

Conclusion

bell hooks warns us, “All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like…I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don’t challenge ourselves to actually practice.” Practice. Vigilant awareness. This is the essence of contemplative pedagogy. This is also the heart of true community.

Contemplative pedagogies ask us to use insight and compassion practices, reflection and introspection, and to use our minds, bodies, and emotions to settle into focused attention and intention. Though these practices are oftentimes individual ones, they are also often done in group settings. By simply turning the focus to include each individual in our classroom, we can begin to create dynamic communities. Holding the intention of building a community by recognizing each other’s humanity through our common bonds, fostering respect and appreciation for our individuality and differences, and cultivating student agency through radical democracy, we can create spaces where students feel connected, more comfortable in their own skin, and control of their learning. These simple yet radical shifts can help nurture a new focus on community building that is needed both in and outside the academe.

Last summer, I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Breading Sweetgrass while camping in Acadia National Park. One evening, while perched on a cliffside overlooking the ocean, I watched a flock of birds fly in formations as if collaborating in a performance. They each responded to the subtle moves of others, shifting up and over as if in attunement. I watched in awe, wondering how long this symbiosis took to fine-tune. Then I returned to the page to read, “Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them.” Kimmerer was asking me to expand my idea of community to include these amazing flying creatures, to the sea life below, to the flora settling in the sunset behind me. Perhaps, if we can successfully begin to expand our contemplative practice of community in our classrooms, neighborhoods, among our colleagues and extend outward to even those whom we consider most different from us, we can also expand our communities to include all creatures. And perhaps, within this newfound reciprocity, we can find peace.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.

———. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2013.

Barbezat, Daniel P., and Mirabai Bush. Contemplative Practices in Higher Education Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning. Jossey-Bass, 2014.

The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, https://www.contemplativemind.org/practices. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.

Duberman, Martin B. Black Mountain: an Exploration in Community. Northwestern UP, 2009.

hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge, 2003.

Ingram, Noël. Interview conducted by Angela Muir, April 2023.

King, Ruth. Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out. Sounds True, 2018.

Muir, Angela, and Paula Mathieu. Contemplative Pedagogy for Health and Well-Being in a Trauma-Filled World, Composition Studies, vol. 50, no. 2, Summer 2022, pp. 154-169.

Pauszek, Jessica. Interview conducted by Angela Muir, September 2023.

Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Uhl, Christopher with Dana L. Stuchul. Teaching as if Life Matters: The Promise of a New Education Culture. Johns Hopkins UP, 2011.

Yagelski, Robert. Writing As a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability. Hampton P, 2011.

Zhang-Wu, Qianqian. Keynote Address. BRAWN Summer Institute, 3 Jun. 2022.