Title
Experiments with Buddhist Forms of Thought, Action and Practice to Promote Significant Learning
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-6-2021
Abstract
While scholars have considered the centrality of teaching in Buddhist traditions and the rich pedagogical resources Buddhism has to offer academic courses on the topic, less attention has been paid to the ways in which Buddhist pedagogy might be applied to the overall structure of course design. This article addresses the challenges of presenting the richness and complexity of Buddhist traditions while also encouraging students to experientially engage such traditions in ways that promote transformative learning. It proposes using Buddhist pedagogical principles, together with a model of significant learning (Fink 2013), to design a course according to the Three Trainings in Wisdom, Ethics and Meditation. Framing the course as a series of experiments in Buddhist forms of thought, action, and practice highlights the critical perspective common to both Buddhist and academic approaches and helps maintain important distinctions between Buddhist traditions and popular secular practices. This article describes specific experiments with Buddhist ways of reading and analyzing classic and contemporary texts, films and images, together with experiments in Buddhist methods of contemplative and ethical practice, in an introductory course in order to help students see how forms of suffering that concern them might arise and be stopped or prevented from a Buddhist point of view.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070503
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Regan, Julie, "Experiments with Buddhist Forms of Thought, Action and Practice to Promote Significant Learning" (2021). Religion Faculty work. 1.
https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/religion_faculty/1
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Comments
This article is the authors' final published version in religions, Volume 12, Issue 7, July 6, 2021, 503.
The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070503. Copyright © Julie Regan