History of Education Review

Mindfulness for teachers: notes toward a discursive cartography

Remy Low,
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Mindfulness
Mindfulness for teachers: notes for teachers
toward a discursive cartography
Remy Low
Sydney School of Education and Social Work,
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Received 6 December 2018
Abstract Revised 23 April 2019
9 May 2019
Purpose – For the interested teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher seeking an entry point Accepted 9 May 2019
into how mindfulness relates to teachers’ work, the burgeoning and divergent appeals for the relevance of
mindfulness to teachers can be bewildering. The purpose of this paper is to offer teachers, teacher educators
and educational researchers a conceptual framework for understanding the different orientations and sources
of mindfulness as it has been recommended to teachers.
Design/methodology/approach – Using Foucault’s (1972) concept of “discursive formations” as a heuristic
device, this paper argues that mindfulness as pitched to teachers can be helpfully understood as arising from
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three distinct orientations.

Findings – Statements about mindfulness and its relevance to teachers emerge from three distinct discursive
formations – traditional, psychological and engaged – that each constitute the “problem” faced by teachers
respectively as suffering, stress or alienation. Specific conceptions of mindfulness are then advanced as a
solution to these problems by certain authoritative subjects and institutions in ways that are taken as
legitimate within each discursive formation.
Originality/value – Apart from offering a historical and discursive mapping of the different discursive
formations from which mindfulness is pitched to teachers, this paper also highlights how each of these
orientations impies a normative view of what a teacher should be. Suggestions for further historical research
are also offered along the lines of genealogy, epistemology and ontology.
Keywords Discourse, Mindfulness, Buddhism, Psychology, Critical pedagogy, Teachers’ work
Paper type Research paper

Varieties of mindfulness
“This one is quite big”. The lady at the Buddhist bookstore pointed out as she emerged from
the stockroom. She held up a book with big green and blue font over a white cover, and what
looked like a little sapling, or maybe a heat-besieged plant. “This it?” She asked. “That’s the
one”. I replied with a grateful but awkward smile. I remember wishing both that the book
was smaller, and the cover a little less dorky, as I paid and carried it out of the store.
Despite my petty reservations about its aesthetic qualities, I saw Happy Teachers Change
The World: A Guide For Cultivating Mindfulness In Education (Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017;
henceforth HTCW) as an important release. As a teacher educator who has attempted to
integrate exercises for cultivating mindfulness in classes concerned with critical self-reflection,
I am curious about how mindfulness is being rendered relevant to teachers in relation to their
work. Specifically, I am interested in how problems faced by teachers are understood, how
mindfulness is conceived in relation to these problems, and the sources of authority on which
claims for its efficacy are made. In this regard HTCW was, and to the best of my knowledge
still is, significant in being the only book (co-)authored by a Buddhist monk on mindfulness
directed at teachers who work in educational institutions. While all who feature in the book
express in common a deep appreciation for the teachings from Plum Village, I was struck by
the subtle but perceptible differences in the way mindfulness was defined and framed by these
voices at the outset: its “lead author[1]” Thich Nhat Hanh – a prominent Vietnamese Zen
Buddhist (Vietnamese: Thiê`n Tông) monk, scholar, peace activist and co-founder of Plum
Village[2]; with a foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn – the famed founder of the widely-used History of Education Review
mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programme – who wrote the foreword; and © Emerald Publishing Limited

Katherine Weare – emeritus professor of education and youth mental health researcher – who
0819-8691
DOI 10.1108/HER-12-2018-0030
 HER compiled and edited the book, and whose commentary throughout translates Nhat Hanh’s
Plum Village practices for educational contexts. As I will elaborate, the differences in emphasis
offered by each within the opening sections of this book offer a condensed example of how
divergent appeals for the relevance of mindfulness to teachers are made. This presents us with
an accessible gateway to consider the different grammars used to talk about the causes of and
cures for the pains of a specific occupation, and of how a practice historically borne by a
particular cultural tradition comes to be “taken up” for different ends.

Discursive formations
For the interested teacher, teacher educator and educational researcher seeking an entry point
into how mindfulness relates to teachers’ work, this very divergence can be a bewildering
experience (Albrecht et al., 2012, p. 2). There may be several reasons for this, not least: the
divergent and sometimes contending definitions of mindfulness in circulation; the proliferating
purposes to which mindfulness is applied; and the diverse claimants of authority to define and
apply mindfulness. These potential points of confusion that teachers may face in reckoning with
mindfulness are closely related to similar issues surrounding the use of mindfulness in other
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fields such as health (Crane, 2017), organisational studies (Islam et al., 2017), politics (Ferguson,
2016) and perhaps surprisingly, in Buddhist studies (Analayo, 2016). This conceptual vagueness,
and consequently its seemingly limitless applicability, has led to two critical evaluations: first,
that mindfulness is, or has become, a “floating” or “empty” signifier that is “void of agreed-upon
meaning” and so “can be filled with any sense desired by the user” (Wallis, 2011); and second,
that the uses to which it is put tend toward politically regressive purposes, most notably
neoliberalism and cultural appropriation (e.g. Hsu, 2016; Reveley, 2016).
While the critical commentary is insightful and, from my perspective as a Southeast
Asian-Australian Dharma practitioner and proponent of critical education, politically necessary
to check the simultaneous banalisation and weaponisation of mindfulness, I will take a slightly
different approach in this paper. While I return to these critiques and their role in fomenting
what can be termed an “engaged mindfulness” tendency in the use of mindfulness, my concern in
the first instance is to engage in a cartography of the different ways that mindfulness has been
recommended to teachers in the hope that “our journeys [into mindfulness] in the present and
future may benefit from the possession and understanding of an accurate map of the past”
(Aldrich, 2003, p. 136) Using Foucault’s (1972) concept of “discursive formations” as a heuristic
device, my goal here is thus to offer a fractional but hopefully helpful guide for making sense of
the different ways that mindfulness is presented to teachers in relation to their work[3]. This
approach involves a “ ‘double bracketing’: Not only must the investigator bracket the truth claims
of the serious speech acts he [sic] is investigating[…] he must also bracket the meaning claims of
the speech acts he studies” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 49). In other words, I seek – at least
until the concluding section – not only to be agnostic as to whether statements on mindfulness
asserted as true are in fact true, I also remain agnostic as to whether such claims are coherent or
even make sense. This renders the study of discursive formations (what Foucault calls
“archaeology”) unique as a way of conceiving of historical research relative to other approaches
insofar as it rejects humanistic accounts of discourse that posit a founding human subject that
serves as the origin of discourse, and eschews the reduction of discourse to some “secret origin”
or “real cause”, preferring to examine discourse as a realm of “manifest appearances” to be
described in its own terms (Howarth, 2000, pp. 50-51). Of course, this is not to deny that certain
discourses prevail in certain historical moments because of social forces that lie beyond them, but
rather than paying attention to the internal logics of a discourse (literally) on their own terms
allows for more subtle, precise links to be drawn between it and its conditions of possibility.
On this basis, I submit that mindfulness as pitched to teachers can be helpfully
understood as arising from three distinct constellations: traditional mindfulness; psychological
mindfulness; and engaged mindfulness. Whilst acknowledging shared sources of inspiration,
 cross-referencing, and chronological and thematic overlaps that continue to take shape, I suggest Mindfulness
that what constitutes and orients mindfulness differs significantly between each of these for teachers
discursive formations. As representative of each discursive formation, I will draw on statements
about mindfulness in relation to teachers that are oriented to each, beginning with those
contained in HTCW. According to Foucault (1972), what makes statements of this sort
representative is not necessarily their significance per se, but that each statement “always
belongs to a series or a whole, always plays a role among other statements, deriving support
from them and distinguishing itself from them: it is always part of a network of statements, in
which it has a role, however minimal it may be, to play” (p. 99). In other words, such statements
make sense because they are related to other statements within a specific knowledge system, and
that system is the discursive formation (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 54). In addition, certain
statements are taken to be serious claims to truth by particular societies and communities at
different points in time according to certain “rules of formation” (Foucault, 1972, p. 38) – that is,
the truth or falsity of a statement is relative to the “conceptual schemes” or “styles of reasoning”
that pertain within the discursive formation from which it emerges (Howarth, 2000, pp. 54-55).
For the present purposes, then, what the inquiry into discursive formations involves is asking
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how (not why) certain claims about mindfulness are put forward and taken seriously.
Foucault (1972) offers four descriptive categories for the analysis of the discursive formations
that govern the production of statements: objects; enunciative modalities; the formation of
concepts; and the formation of strategies. These categories refer, respectively, to the objects
about which statements are made, the subject and institutional positions from which statements
are enunciated, the concepts involved in the construction of discourse, and the way themes and
theories are developed (Howarth, 2002, p. 120; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. 61). It is also
important to mention that what marks out a discursive formation is not the uniformity or
coherence of the statements that emerge from it; internal diversity – what Foucault (1972)
describes as “systems of dispersion” (p. 37) – is unsurprising. What marks a discursive formation
as a distinct network or system of statements are its “rules of formation” – those conceptual
schemes and styles of reasoning that qualify or disqualify statements as serious claims.
Drawing on this theoretical lens, I submit that statements about mindfulness and its
relevance to teachers contain conceptions of mindfulness that emerge from distinct
discursive formations, each with objects of concern (i.e. “problems”) to which mindfulness is
advanced as a solution by certain authors and institutions, and through rhetorical strategies
that are distinct to those formations. As such, each also contains a normative view of what
teachers should be – a point I will make in the concluding section. I will begin with what I
have labelled “traditional mindfulness”.

Traditional mindfulness
By “traditional”, I do not mean to denote a formation that is archaic or a relic of the past that
has been superseded vis-à-vis some referent of “progress” (e.g. European enlightenment or
Western modernity). Also, I am neither making an apology for the primacy of the past in
determining what is “original” or “pure”, nor invested in the opposite project of “unmasking”
how tradition is merely a reactionary or nostalgic fiction of the present. By traditional, I
invoke Asad’s (1986/2009) concept of “discursive tradition” – an analytical frame that seeks
to move beyond these tendencies toward essentialism or extreme nominalism. A tradition,
according to Asad (1986/2009), consists of:
[D]iscourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given
practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually
to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper
performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured
in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is
linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions). (p. 20)
 HER The crucial insight that arises from this definition of tradition is that it does not stand
opposed or other to so-called “modernity”. Rather, tradition can be seen in the reiteration of
historically-inherited thought and practice in each conjuncture; it is “a dimension of social
life and not a stage of social development” (Asad and Mahmood, 1996). Based on this
insight, I will take as operating within a traditional discursive formation all statements
about mindfulness that seek to instruct practitioners with primary reference to the name of
the Buddha, historical Buddhist teachings (the Dharma), and the authority of Buddhist
monastics (the Sangha) – what is known within as the “three refuges” (Lopez, 2001). Of
course, there is significant interpretive heterogeneity within the Buddhist tradition so
broadly conceived (Lopez, 1988; Johnson et al., 2005; Harvey, 2012). As with any discursive
formation, such differences do not so much indicate the absence of a Buddhist tradition as
its ongoing vitality, as well as the social, political and historical conditions that render
certain teachings, institutions and practices more or less viable.
For reasons of his uniqueness and institutional position as the leader of a monastic
community addressing teachers in non-Buddhist institutions, a good starting point for
analysing the traditional discursive formation is Nhat Hanh’s “Letter to a young teacher”
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from HTCW. The object of concern he states, to which his conception of mindfulness is
meant to address, is “suffering”. The use of this term positions Nhat Hanh in the Buddhist
tradition, for which suffering’s existence, causes, cessation and path to cessation of suffering
are foundational to its understanding of reality – what is known as the “Four Noble Truths”
(Rahula, 1959). Indeed, the Buddha is often cited as knowing only two things, “namely
suffering and the cessation of suffering” (Gethin, 1998, p. 59). The interpretation of these,
however, are marked by complex historical divergences. For Nhat Hanh (2014, in Nhat Hanh
and Weare, 2017), suffering is detectable in the pursuit of objects that bring pleasure, the
lack of awareness of oneself and others, and that which draws a person away from the
present moment in search of some future happiness. This represents in part an
interpretation of suffering that hints at antecedents in early-Buddhist texts (e.g. the
Majjhima Nikaya and Samyutta Nikaya) that link suffering to the futile attempt to grasp
at objects of “greed and delight” and the “thirst for objects of sense desire” that are
impermanent, compounded by the ignorance that this is the case (in Gethin, 1998, pp. 59-68;
also Bodhi, 1998, pp. 1-10).
In light of this suffering, Nhat Hanh (2014, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017) proposes his
definition of mindfulness as “a kind of energy that helps us to be fully present in the here
and the now, aware of what is going on in our body, in our feelings, in our mind, and in the
world, so that we can get in touch with the wonders of life that can nourish and heal us”
(p. xvii). By emphasising that the conditions for resolving suffering lies, at least in part, in
the present moment and world, Nhat Hanh (2014, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017) can also be
seen to be advancing a traditional position – specifically an East Asian Mahayana Buddhist
insistence on the non-duality and interpenetration of the realm of suffering (samsara) and
liberation (nirvana) (Nagao, 1991) – interpreted in light of contemporary preoccupations,
leading some scholars to regard him as a representative of “Buddhist modernism”
(McMahan, 2008) or “modern Buddhism” (Lopez, 2002). These become clear when
considering how mindfulness as a solution to suffering is conceived by Nhat Hanh.
The first notable aspect in Nhat Hanh’s (2014, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017)
conceptualisation of mindfulness is that it enables being “fully present in the here and the now”
with awareness of the body, feelings, mind, and worldly phenomena (p. xvii). This corresponds
with the teachings on the “Establishments of Mindfulness” (Satipatthana Sutta) attributed to the
Buddha (as the tenth discourse of the Majjhima Nikaya), of which Nhat Hanh (1990) has been a
prominent translator and commentator. In that work, Nhat Hanh (1990) also specifies
mindfulness practice “as the main gate to awakening” (p. 25), the key to attaining qualities
for awakening (bodhipakkhiyadhamma) according to Buddhist soteriology: “the Four
 Establishments, the Five Faculties, the Five powers, the Seven Factors of Awakening, and the Mindfulness
Noble Eightfold Path” (p. 25). Where Nhat Hanh (2014, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017) differs for teachers
from other traditional commentators is in two respects: that mindfulness is “a kind of energy”,
and that its purpose is “so that we can get in touch with the wonders of life that can
nourish and heal us” (p. xvii). This contrasts with “energy” understood as a prerequisite for
establishing mindfulness that is directed to realising how the body, feelings, mind and
worldly phenomena are unattractive, unsatisfactory, impermanent and empty according to
early-Buddhist texts and commentaries by contemporary Theravada scholars (e.g. Analayo,
2003; Sujato, 2012; Bodhi, 2016). This is suggestive of the two precedents abovementioned.
In East Asian Mahayana Buddhism, especially as developed in the Chinese context as a
precursor to Nhat Hanh’s Chan/Thien lineage, Indian Buddhist soteriology and practice
were Sinicised with indigenous notions of vital energies (qì) of cosmic nature (xìng) that
practitioners could harmonise with through meditative practices (Sharf, 2002). With this
background, Chinese Mahayana Buddhism reoriented meditation – rhetorically if not
entirely in practice – from a renunciation of worldly involvement towards a channelling of
energies for “attentive virtuosity” toward the warp and weft of worldly circumstances
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(Hershock, 2005, p. 77), culminating in Chan’s “emphatic rejection of any trance-like sensory
withdrawal in favour of total mindfulness of one’s surroundings” (Sponberg, 1986, p. 27).
For Nhat Hanh (1990), this harnessing of energy in oneself enables the avowal of life and the
world in the moment, including the ability to recognise and embrace suffering in order to
discover latent possibilities – what is captured in the phrase “transformation of suffering”
that recurs in his commentary on the Satipatthana Sutta (titled Transformation and
Healing). Rather than trying to cultivate nonattachment to the realm of suffering, then, Nhat
Hanh’s conception of mindfulness exhorts the breaking down of one’s “defensive barriers so
as to enter into the interrelatedness of all things” and to use this insight gained from the
pacification of one’s own greed, anger, and delusion to also “pacify the forces of greed,
anger, and delusion in the world at large” ( Johnson et al., 2005, p. 239). Again, precedents for
this conceptualisation can be found in Mahayana Buddhist teachings with its soteriological
(and also polemical[4]) ideal of the Bodhisattva who does not seek to leave the realm of
suffering, but constantly returns to it for the sake of other beings (Nagao, 1991). Particularly
noteworthy is its radical interpretation by Fazang (643-712CE) – the third patriarch of the
Chinese Mahayana school of Huayan (“Flower Ornament”) that had a significant impact on
Chan/Thien – who synthesised indigenous Chinese and Mahayana concepts to argue for the
impossibility of a separate Nirvana/Samsara (Khalil, 2006). According to this view: “One
attains Buddhahood by appreciating the wonder of the universe [and] acting out of
discernment and compassion, attuned to its infinite ramifications” ( Johnson et al., 2005,
p. 195). What Nhat Hanh does is articulate mindfulness to this radical non-duality and
politicise its implications, reflecting a modern movement known as “engaged Buddhism” of
which he is a pioneering exponent (King, 2009). This is evident in his exhortation to teachers
at the beginning of HTCW: “Our mission as teachers is not just to transmit knowledge, but
to form human beings, to construct a worthy, beautiful human race, in order to take care of
our precious planet” (Nhat Hanh, 2014, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017, p. xvii).
If Nhat Hanh’s characterisation of mindfulness as a life and world affirming energy can be
understood as drawing on the one hand from precedents in East Asian Mahayana Buddhism,
then on the other it must also be taken as a specific interpretation addressed to the twentieth- and
twenty-first century concerns. In this, Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness can be culturally located as
reflecting the themes of what McMahan (2008) has termed “Buddhist modernism” – “forms of
Buddhism that have emerged out of an engagement with the dominant cultural and intellectual
forces of modernity” – especially where its emphases on ordinary life and relational engagement
aligns with European romanticism, Euro-American transcendentalism, critical sociology, and
deep ecology (pp. 6, 149-182, 215-240; also Tamdgidi, 2008; Gregory and Sabra, 2008).
 HER Nhat Hanh’s rhetoric can also be historically located in what Lopez (2002) has labelled “modern
Buddhism” – denoting the various efforts made by some Asian Buddhist teachers to reframe the
tradition in the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries in response to colonial domination and
anticolonial struggles, Christian missionary proselytism, and modern science. While the use of
“modernism” and “modern” by these scholars may serve to reinforce the unhelpful notion that
contemporary iterations of Buddhism are discontinuous from tradition as mentioned above, they
do highlight the novelty of Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of the Buddhist tradition. When his book
to teachers is taken as a whole with Weare and Kabat-Zinn, Nhat Hanh’s pitch corresponds with
some of the rhetorical strategies characteristic of so-called modern Buddhism, which seeks to
position Buddhism as being “most compatible with the ideals of the European Enlightenment
[…] embodied in such concepts as reason, empiricism, science, universalism, individualism,
tolerance, freedom, and the rejection of religious orthodoxy” (Lopez, 2002, pp. ix-x). Although not
a single reference to the Buddha or Buddhist teachings is made in HTCW, the Nhat Hanh’s
corpus and public persona remain tethered to his authority as a monk. The rejection of religious
orthodoxy, however, is more explicit in the way mindfulness is conceived in the discursive
formation that Weare and Kabat-Zinn position themselves in – what can be labelled
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“psychological mindfulness”.

Psychological mindfulness
By tagging a large body of work on mindfulness with the prefix “psychological”, I am
denoting those that primarily emphasise the psychological effects of mindfulness – most
prominently on cognitive performance and/or therapeutic outcomes. This can be detected in
the way mindfulness is framed by Kabat-Zinn and Weare in their respective sections of
HTCW. “Mindfulness”, begins Kabat-Zinn (in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017) in his Foreword,
involves cultivating the “capacity to pay attention” (p. xiii). For him, such attention is
important because it enhances the capacity “to be creative, love one’s work, navigate the
digital/analog divide, and experience a lifetime of learning” (Kabat-Zinn, in Nhat Hanh and
Weare, 2017, p. xv). For her part, Weare (2016, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017) positions the
relevance and importance of mindfulness in education by citing “scientific evidence” for its
ability to address a “range of mental and physical health problems”; contribute to “the
development of cognitive and performance skills and executive function”; and alter “the
structure and function of the brain to improve the quality of both thought and feeling”
(Weare, 2016, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017, pp. xxxix-xliii). Elsewhere, in a report that
surveys the research on mindfulness for teachers, Weare (2014) states the case summarily in
terms of improving “staff occupational wellbeing and job satisfaction [and] performance” by
reducing “the wasted expenditure and human misery represented by the many days of
stress related sickness and attrition from the teaching profession” (p. 18).
Reflecting the twin objects of concern that mark psychological mindfulness more
broadly, the accent on teacher performance as the desired object and stress as the problem
object is particularly noteworthy here. For Weare (2014), the former refers both to enhance
cognitive functions such as “executive function[…] which includes focus, attention, problem
solving, planning, and self-management” (p. 16), and role-specific tasks like “better
classroom management and organisation, greater ability to prioritise, to see the whole
picture, to be more self-motivated and autonomous, to show greater attunement to students’
needs, and achieve more supportive relationships with them” (p. 2). All this is diminished,
however, by a combination of “externally driven” and “inherent” stressors on teachers
(Weare, 2014, pp. 9-10). Albrecht et al. (2012), in their review of research on mindfulness
teacher training, state the problem of mental health and the promise of better performance in
near identical terms – that: “Stress is not only impacting Australia’s children but also being
felt by teachers worldwide. Teaching in the school system has become increasingly
unattractive with retention and attrition a global concern” (p. 1); and that “mindfulness has
 the potential to positively influence and shape behaviour management strategies, teacher Mindfulness
professional development as well as learning strategies” (p. 11). Likewise, in articulating the for teachers
rationale for offering mindfulness training to K-12 teachers derived from the extant
literature, Meiklejohn et al. (2012) point out how these teachers “report experiencing a
moderate to high level of stress” and “face an array of stressors, yet are provided with few
resources with which to alleviate them” (p. 292), and how in the face of this: “personal
training in mindfulness skills can increase teachers’ sense of well-being and teaching
self-efficacy, as well as their ability to manage classroom behavior and establish and
maintain supportive relationships with students” (p. 291). Such foregrounding of the twin
objects of teacher performance and stress, with their respective positive and negative
valences, predominate the framing of research on the psychological efficacy of mindfulness
for teachers (e.g. Flook et al., 2013; Gold et al., 2010; Jennings et al., 2013; Poulin et al., 2008;
Rechtschaffen, 2014; Schoeberlein and Sheth, 2009; Roeser et al., 2012). By framing the
issues teachers face in this way, psychological mindfulness can be seen to reflect the
preoccupations of a broader recent interest in promoting teacher wellbeing (Acton and
Glasgow, 2015).
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While many works from this discursive formation mention the social and institutional
contexts in which teacher stress arises and performance negatively affected – most notably
heavy workload demands driven by standardised testing, increasing student needs, and
externally imposed accountability measures (e.g. Albrecht et al., 2012; Flook et al., 2013;
Jennings, 2015; Roeser et al., 2013; Weare, 2014) – mindfulness here is predominantly
focused on relieving the symptoms of stress and enhancing job-specific performance. This
way of conceiving of mindfulness can be seen to derive from a source that is almost
universally cited in the research conducted within this discursive formation: Kabat-Zinn
(1994), whose definition of mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose,
in the present moment and non-judgmentally” (p. 4) is almost universally cited in recent
psychological research on mindfulness. Kabat-Zinn (1990) advanced this rendering of
mindfulness in his book Full Catastrophe Living – an account of the stress reduction clinic
programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center established in 1979 – what
would eventually come to be widely disseminated globally as the eight-week MBSR
programme (Kabat-Zinn, 2011, p. 282). There, mindfulness is elaborated as a trait (“moment
to moment awareness”) cultivated by a meditational state (“purposefully paying attention to
things we never ordinarily give a moment’s thought to”) that individuals can actively learn
to deal with their own experiences of stress, pain and illness. This active learning involved
using specific practices adapted from Buddhist and Hindu sources (e.g. sitting and walking
meditation, hatha yoga) to produce an attitudinal shift towards human finitude and frailty,
which might lead to a reduction of symptoms associated with stress, pain and illness.
This initial positioning of mindfulness as a means of symptom reduction in a clinical
setting – what Kabat-Zinn (1990) calls “a new branch of medicine known as behavioural
medicine” (p. 1) – is the progenitor of proliferating and evolving therapeutic uses of
mindfulness (e.g. “Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy”; Segal et al., 2002). It also forms
the basis for the mindfulness programs targeting teacher stress that are most regularly-
cited – for example, the complete MBSR programme (Gold et al., 2010); school-based
“modified MBSR” (mMBSR) (Flook et al., 2013); “Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in
Education” (CARE) ( Jennings et al., 2013); “Mindfulness-based Wellness Education”
(MBWE) (Poulin et al., 2008); and “Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques
(SMART) in education” (Roeser et al., 2013) – as well as books directly addressed to stressed
teachers (e.g. Rechtschaffen, 2014; Hassed and Chambers, 2014; Jennings, 2015). The specific
practices recommended varies across these different uses, but several core features of
Kabat-Zinn’s initial programme remain intact, including the way mindfulness is defined and
the emphasis on attitudinal change for symptom reduction.
 HER Apart from informing what mindfulness is and is meant to do, MBSR’s positioning as a type
of clinically-born “behavioural medicine” has also shaped how mindfulness is justified within this
discursive formation and consequently, by whom. This is most evident in the commonly-used
phrase “mindfulness-based intervention”. The term “intervention” in psychological discourse
generally denotes “any treatment undertaken to halt, manage, or alter the course of the
pathological process of a disease or disorder” (APA, 2016, p. 231). To make the case for the
effectiveness of any intervention so defined, according to the APA, two dimensions of research
“evidence” need to be addressed: treatment efficacy – “the systematic and scientific evaluation of
whether a treatment works”; and clinical utility – “the applicability, feasibility, and usefulness of
the intervention in the local or specific setting where it is to be offered[…] [Including]
determination of the generalisability of an intervention whose efficacy has been established”
(APA, 2002, p. 1053). When recommending mindfulness to teachers on this basis, then, the key
rhetorical strategy is to establish its efficacy and utility as “evidence-based”, usually constructed
by citing the results of randomised control trials (RCTs)[5] that involve pre- and post-intervention
reporting from teacher participants, with the most esteemed using measurement scales for
occupational psychology like the “Maslach Burnout Inventory” alongside mindfulness
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measurement scales like Baer et al.’s (2004, 2008) “Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire”
(e.g. Flook et al., 2013; Jennings et al., 2013; Jennings, 2015; Roeser et al., 2013) and the “Kentucky
Inventory of Mindfulness Skills” (Gold et al., 2010; Poulin et al., 2008). Arguments for the
generalisability of mindfulness to teachers has also been attempted by citing meta-analyses of
mindfulness programs on analogous clinical adult populations because the number of RCTs
specifically done with teachers is currently insufficient to make the case for this occupational
group across its various contexts (e.g. Meiklejohn et al., 2012, p. 296; Weare, 2014, p. 11). In view
of this, two further rhetorical moves are commonly made. One is the qualified suggestion of
positive benefits accompanied by an exhortation for further “rigorous” and “scientific” research –
specifically RCTs – to be done on teacher-targeted programs so that a stronger case for its
general utility can be made in the near future (e.g. Meiklejohn et al., 2012,
pp. 302-303; Schonert-Reichl and Roeser, 2016, p. 13). The second move is the increasing use
of neuroimaging studies of meditators – sometimes as a central basis (e.g. Hassed and Chambers,
2014, pp. 21-48), but mostly as a supplementary form of evidence in lieu of meta-analyses – to
make a claim for the generalisability of mindfulness-based interventions because of their
neurophysiological effects (e.g. Meiklejohn et al., 2012, pp. 293-294; Rechtschaffen, 2014, p. 27;
Weare, 2014, pp. 5-6). In short, the generalisability of mindfulness for all teachers is being made
by a sideways appeal to analogous populations and its underlying neurophysiological benefits.
By establishing a normative criterion for how statements about mindfulness for teachers
should be constructed and evaluated – that is, according to the model of clinical
interventions – the work in this discursive formation also imply the authoritative subject
and institutional positions from where such statements can be made. There are two notable
tendencies in this regard that can be read as simultaneous associating and dissociating
moves. The first is, unsurprisingly, that what counts as serious statement on mindfulness is
associated with those who have institutionally-sanctioned access to the apparatuses and
populations necessary to conduct research studies recognised within this discourse as
“rigorous” and “scientific”. Most commonly, this refers to university-based educational
researchers who publish the results of such studies in peer-reviewed journals of psychology
(e.g. Jennings et al., 2013; Roeser et al., 2012, 2013), neuroscience (e.g. Flook et al., 2013), and
health science (e.g. Napoli, 2004; Poulin et al., 2008) that conform to this model of inquiry. In
addition, survey articles on mindfulness for teachers tend to foreground these studies
“evidence-based” in multidisciplinary journals on education and/or mindfulness (Albrecht
et al., 2012; Meiklejohn et al., 2012).
Alongside the association of mindfulness with certain types of researchers and research,
there is also a discernible tendency to dissociate it from the Buddhist tradition within this
 discursive formation – that is, to render it secular. Recall Kabat-Zinn’s (1990) conception of Mindfulness
mindfulness as a trait cultivated through a meditative state that has historically been for teachers
associated with a set of practices found within the Buddhist and Hindu traditions; the
secularisation of mindfulness proceeds by parsing these apart. Specifically, mindfulness as
a trait is argued to be a universal feature of the human mind that has been historically
cultivated in all cultural traditions around the world. Its specific association with the
Buddhist tradition, and Eastern philosophical-religious traditions more broadly, is thus
regarded as merely incidental. This is evident from Kabat-Zinn’s (1990) early work within
this discursive formation, where he acknowledges that the “systematic cultivation of
mindfulness has been called the heart of Buddhist meditation” before asserting that “its
essence is universal” and hence: “it can be learned and practiced, as we do in the stress clinic,
without appealing to Oriental culture or Buddhist authority to enrich it or authenticate it”
(p. 12). While Kabat-Zinn (2011) has in more recent reflections been more frank in his
admission that he “bent over backward to structure (MBSR) and find ways to speak about it
that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern
Mysticism’ or just plain ‘flakey’ ”, he nevertheless insists that “mindfulness[…] has little or
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nothing to do with Buddhism per se” (pp. 282-283). Regardless of his more recent
circumspection, Kabat-Zinn’s earlier dissociative move is replicated in works appealing to
teachers from this discursive formation, where mindfulness is represented historically as a
universal and innate property of humans (e.g. Albrecht et al., 2012, p. 5; Hassed and
Chambers, 2014, p. 6; Jennings, 2015, p. 1; Rechtschaffen, 2014, p. 10), or as having
origins in the Buddhist tradition but now secularised and standardised into a “scientifically-
based” intervention (e.g. Poulin et al., 2008, p. 72; Meiklejohn et al., 2012, p. 292; Weare, 2013,
p. 142), or with reference to Kabat-Zinn only (e.g. Flook et al., 2013, p. 183; Gold et al., 2010,
pp. 184-185; Jennings et al., 2013, p. 376; Roeser et al., 2012, p. 169; Roeser et al., 2013, p. 3;
Weare, 2014, p. 4).

Engaged mindfulness
Tucked amidst the eminent names at the beginning of HTCW is a preface attributed to “The
Plum Village Community” (PVC) – presumably referring to the monastics of the tradition
and perhaps some lay teachers. In it, they insist that based on the teachings of Nhat Hanh,
“the true practice of mindfulness cannot be devoid of a spiritual or ethical dimension”, and
that it “is not a means to arrive at an end; it is not a tool for us to get better outcomes later”
(PVC, 2016, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017, p. xxvii). This interesting interjection, lodged
between Nhat Hanh’s letter and Weare’s preface, can be read as a statement responding to
the manner in which psychological mindfulness has framed the practice in education. This
resonates with a discernible emergent formation – what I will designate as “engaged
mindfulness”. While some scholars and activists have begun to use the prefix “engaged”
with mindfulness (e.g. Berila et al., 2017), I use the term with regard to teachers to bring
together three precedents that I consider to mark this orientation – the first two as critiques
in relation to what psychological mindfulness in education is argued to be disengaged from,
and the latter as an antecedent for reengagement that, while preceding the critiques of
psychological mindfulness in time, can nonetheless be seen as informing them by offering
an alternative vision of how mindfulness might otherwise be conceived and practiced.
First, engaged mindfulness arose from dissatisfaction with the sole or primary emphasis in
psychological mindfulness on the need for individual change, which shifts the focus away from
the institutional and social settings of education that generate teacher stress, burnout, attrition,
etc. The latter include conditions of increasing pressure wrought by standardised testing, teacher
accountability and compliance demands, and cuts to school funding in the context of neoliberal
education reforms (Hsu, 2016, p. 372; Forbes, 2017, p. 149). More than a mere case of neglect,
however, there is also an accompanying concern that the individualising focus of psychological
 HER mindfulness actually abets the functioning of the dominant capitalist order by producing a docile
workforce, albeit one that is attentive and emotionally self-regulating (Hsu, 2016, p. 371; Cannon,
2016, pp. 400-401; Forbes, 2017, p. 151; O’Donnell, 2016, p. 34). Psychological mindfulness, with its
emphasis on “inner” states, is thus seen to be directly or indirectly sustaining systemically unjust
“outer” conditions.
This first critique of psychological mindfulness is closely related to a second – that these
pernicious uses of mindfulness are made possible because of its extraction from the
Buddhist discursive tradition where it resides within an ethical framework (Cannon, 2016,
pp. 399-400; Forbes, 2017, p. 146; Hyland, 2015, p. 171; O’Donnell, 2016, p. 34). Apart
from this ethical unmooring, critics additionally assert that the strategies used to
decouple mindfulness from its Buddhist sources and communities – secularisation and
universalisation through “scientific rigour” – conform to a pattern of colonial exploitation:
Global North/Western societies and sciences “discover” the validity of knowledge systems
hitherto disparaged, then appropriate them as their own by erasing or trivialising the people
who have sustained those knowledges (Hsu, 2016, p. 373; Cannon, 2016, pp. 401-403; Hyde
and LaPrad, 2015, p. 3; Rodriguez and Tippins, 2017, p. 102). The procurement of
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mindfulness must thus be understood in the context of historically asymmetric power

relations, especially Western European imperialism in Asia and the marginalisation of
Asian migrants in white-dominant societies of the Global North.
Against these twin disengagements from socio-political contexts and historical Buddhist
communities that psychological mindfulness is said to perpetuate, but without dismissing
outright its therapeutic benefits for teachers who are under duress, proponents of engaged
mindfulness commonly make reference to a thread within the Buddhist discursive tradition
that exemplifies the connection between inner and outer change – engaged Buddhism. As
mentioned above, this term is commonly associated with Nhat Hanh and his pioneering
work interpreting Buddhist ethics to address pressing socio-political issues. Fomented by
the articulation of Buddhism with peace work during the wars that roiled Vietnam in the
twentieth century, Nhat Hanh’s engaged Buddhism frames the virtue and practice of
mindfulness as responsiveness to social conflict and ecological destruction (Nhat Hanh,
2008, p. 31). This model of engagement is frequently drawn upon in engaged mindfulness
both to contrast against psychological mindfulness’s lack of ethical mooring when applied
to education, and to offer an alternative account of mindfulness that combines personal and
socio-political change (e.g. Adarkar and Keiser, 2007; Hattam, 2008; Cannon, 2016; Hyland,
2016, 2017). However, while engaged Buddhism’s primary authoritative references remain
located within the Buddhist discursive tradition, what marks engaged mindfulness as
distinct from this is the language of its diagnosis of the problems faced by teachers
and its prognoses offered, which tend to draw mainly from critical pedagogy and social
justice education.
In this discursive formation, the problem object can be summed up most broadly by the
concept of “alienation”, which can be simply understood as “consisting in the problematic
separation of a subject and object that properly belong together” (Leopold, 2018). Teachers
are understood to be alienated because of an education system, and of a society more
broadly, that is organised in fundamentally oppressive ways. The effect of this is a threefold
disconnection that teachers experience: from their own bodies, from other people (including
colleagues and students), and from the world (Bai et al., 2009, p. 320). The specific
reasons offered for this threefold alienation are the external pressures on teachers’ work
(Forbes, 2017, p. 151; Hsu, 2016, p. 372; O’Donnell, 2016, pp. 40-41), internalised oppression
the teacher may embody as a member of a marginalised social group (Patel et al., 2013, p. 5;
Adarkar and Keiser, 2007; Golding, 2015), and/or the prevailing ways of knowing and being
in educational institutions that privilege third-person perspectives, measurement and
competition (Patel et al., 2013, p. 7; Ng, 2015).
 In the face of teacher alienation, mindfulness is conceived within this discursive Mindfulness
formation as one way to reconnect with what an unjust society has separated so that for teachers
teachers can participate more fully in progressive social change. Some point out its ability to
reconnect teachers to their bodies. For example, Patel et al. (2013) regard it as a practice “to
more holistically support politically conscious teachers, many of whom were people of
colour, as they engage in the herculean efforts to interrupt the deeply oppressive
practices visited on them and their students every day” (p. 6). Bai et al. (2009) suggest
mindfulness alongside loving-kindness (metta) practices as important practices for teachers’
“self-exploration and self-care” because they “enhance and support self-knowledge,
self-regulation, and freedom to co-create with others internal states and interpersonal
relationships that are coherent and emotionally regulated” (p. 332). Others focus on the
social connections that mindfulness can help teachers build or become more aware of.
Ng (2015) proposes what he calls “critical and civic mindfulness” to “help people cultivate
the ethical and political sensibilities for more robust civic participation, alongside the
cultivation of mental health and personal wellbeing”. Similarly, Hyde and LaPrad (2015)
consider the self-investigation and reflection supported by mindfulness “necessary to
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uncover and challenge long-held mental scripts that see different others as the competition
or the enemy” (p. 3). A common theme in this discursive tradition is the linking of these
personal and interpersonal (re)connections enabled by mindfulness with challenging the
causes of teacher alienation.
Given that alienation is the overarching problem facing teachers according to engaged
mindfulness and considering its criticisms of psychological mindfulness as perpetuating
this alienation under the aegis of “scientific rigour”, it is notable that there is a greater stress
on the positionality of authors in the rhetoric of this discursive tradition. Authors usually
declare themselves to be teacher educators who are committed mindfulness practitioners
and advocates of critical pedagogy (or adjacent approaches) (e.g. Hattam, 2008; Bai et al.,
2009; Patel et al., 2013; Hyde and LaPrad, 2015; Cannon, 2016; O’Donnell, 2016; Rodriguez
and Tippins, 2017). This style of writing can be described as “critical first-person discourse”
(Roth, 2006), and its prevalence in writings about contemplative practices like mindfulness
may owe to their specificity as practices, which require those who proffer them to declare an
ongoing “practice commitment” sustained by a belief in their beneficial, transformative
effects on “character development” (Komjathy, 2018, pp. 14-15).
When considering the shape that such first-person accounts take, two further rhetorical
strategies are notably deployed to promote mindfulness to teachers. The first strategy can
be described as “tethering”, which involves the articulation of mindfulness mainly as a
useful practice for achieving the ends of critical pedagogy and social justice, broadly
conceived (e.g. Hyde and LaPrad, 2015; Cannon, 2016). Alongside this tendency exists
another that, following Mani (2009), I call “transcoding”. This describes work that seeks to
“bring the insights of spiritual and secular knowledge to bear on current phenomena”, and
that “requires one to translate between and across epistemes or ways of knowing” (Mani,
2009, p. 2). Within the engaged mindfulness orientation, transcoding is detectable in authors
who reckon not only with what the practice might contribute to helping teachers achieve the
desired ends of critical pedagogy and social justice, but also with what mindfulness as
understood within the Buddhist discursive tradition might mean for how those ends – and
indeed the very “self” of the teacher that strives for them – might be (re)conceived
(e.g. Adarkar and Keiser, 2007; Hattam, 2008; Bai et al., 2009; Ng, 2015; Golding, 2015).

Concluding reflections
In the preceding sections, I have made the case that statements about mindfulness and its
relevance to teachers emerge from three distinct discursive formations – traditional,
psychological, and engaged – that each constitutes the primary “problem” faced by teachers
 HER respectively as suffering, stress, or alienation. Specific conceptions of mindfulness are then
advanced as a solution to these problems by certain authoritative subjects and institutions
in ways that are taken as legitimate within each discursive formation: whether it is regarded
as part of the path towards liberating self and others from the causes of suffering vis-à-vis
the “three refuges”; or as a “scientifically-based” intervention to relieve stress and enhance
performance as recommended by psychologists and university-based researchers; or as a
way to overcome the alienation from oneself, others, and the world that teachers face
because of oppressive social conditions identified by critical pedagogues. What each of
these discursive formations also imply through the way they advance mindfulness for
teachers is a normative view of what a teacher should be: For those based in the Buddhist
discursive tradition, the ideal teacher can be seen as a modern Bodhisattva; for proponents
of psychological mindfulness, the resilient and attentive teacher; and for the engaged
mindfulness movement, the holistic activist.
As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, in making the case that statements
pitching mindfulness to teachers tend to stem from one of these three discursive
formations, I neither wish to suggest that they are mutually exclusive, nor that they are
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valued equally within the prevailing education systems in Australia and other countries of
the Global North/West. Perhaps mapping these discursive formations in a simple Venn
diagram may serve as a helpful way of approaching this (Figure 1), and for opening up the
discussion of mindfulness for teachers offered in this paper to further exploration and
development along those lines. This diagram can be read in three ways: diachronically,
synchronically and hierarchically.
First, this diagram can be read from right to left in a diachronic way, most straightforwardly
as a representation of the emergence of contemporary mindfulness along a temporal axis – as
borne by the soteriological system of the Buddhist discursive tradition, developed or
expropriated (depending on one’s perspective) by psychological discourse for therapeutic and
performance-enhancing purposes, then taken up by critical pedagogues for overcoming the
alienation experienced by teachers. In addition, the sections of overlap also invite a closer
investigation into the genealogies of each position on mindfulness. The most obvious example of
this, as mentioned above, is Kabat-Zinn’s more recent acknowledgements of the traditional
Buddhist sources of MBSR, as well as his latest attempts at rendering mindfulness more
engaged with worldly issues (e.g. Kabat-Zinn, 2005). Bell Hooks (1994) – an early proponent of
this bringing together of engaged Buddhism and critical education in her “engaged pedagogy” –
is another whose antecedents can be interestingly charted in this way.
A second approach to this diagram is synchronic, which apart from allowing for
positions on mindfulness to be mapped as more or less oriented to one discursive formation
or another, also encourages more subtle accounts of those that may draw from different
discursive formations even if they remain primarily located in one. The latter may yield

Psychological

Traditional Engaged
Figure 1.
Mapping mindfulness
 interesting cases of cultural-epistemological “hybridity”, forged in unique historical Mindfulness
conditions, where mindfulness is articulated “from the interstitial perspective” (Bhabha, for teachers
1994, p. 3). Nhat Hanh’s work-in-exile is a good case of this (Sullivan and Arat, 2018).
Finally, the diagram also invites a hierarchical reading that points to the uneven
distribution of value and power afforded to the different discursive formations within a
given conjuncture. With regard to the dominant discourses that structure education systems
in the Global North/West, for instance, psychological mindfulness with its strategies for
establishing “scientific rigour” will tend to be taken as more legitimate in its appeal to
teachers than those stemming from the traditional or engaged discursive formations
(Hsu, 2016; Hyland, 2015). This raises further questions for interested scholars: Is
scientific rationality – entailing universalising and secularising tendencies – not simply
an “epistemological possibility” but an “ontological condition” (Hirschkind, 2018), a
prerequisite for any discourse on the ideal teacher and teachers’ work to be taken seriously?
What, then, does this reveal about the ways teachers and their work can (and cannot)
be conceived?
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Notes
1. Thich Nhat Hanh suffered a severe stroke on 11 November 2014 and has since had limited mobility
and speech (Plum Village, 2017). According to Weare (2016, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017), this
book was compiled by gathering some of Nhat Hanh’s teachings and practices alongside accounts
from teachers about how these have been used in their classes. Weare appears to have had a
significant editorial oversight of this book – see Weare (2016, in Nhat Hanh and Weare, 2017,
pp. xxxii-xxxv).
2. Plum Village, located in Dordogne, France, was founded by Thich Nhat Hanh and Buddhist nun
Chan Khong in 1982 following Nhat Hanh’s exile from Vietnam 1966. While Plum Village is a
highly popular meditation retreat centre for lay visitors, it is important to note that its primary
institutional function is as a monastery for Buddhist monks and nuns ordained in the monastic
order founded by Nhat Hanh – the Order of Interbeing. This is also true of its associated
monasteries in the USA, Thailand and Hong Kong (see Nhat Hanh, 2002).
3. This is distinguished from writings that mainly offer guidelines for delivering mindfulness
programs to students. For the differences in the literature, see Meiklejohn et al. (2012).
4. Historically, the Bodhisattva ideal has been rhetorically deployed by Mahayana Buddhists as a
marker of ethical superiority over their Theravada counterparts, whose alleged concern with
attaining the state of ultimate insight and Nirvana (arhat) is taken to be inimical to concern about
worldly suffering. This was one of the polemical points behind the use of the sectarian label
Hinayana (i.e. “Lesser Vehicle”) to describe earlier Buddhist schools prior to the Mahayana
(i.e. “Great Vehicle”). For an overview of the polemics, see Oldmeadow (1997). For a Theravada
response, see Ratnayaka (1985).
5. The APA considers RCTs to be the most sophisticated type of evidence with regard to intervention
research. It sits at the top of an ascending order of evidence because: “randomized controlled
experiments represent a more stringent way to evaluate treatment efficacy because they are
the most effective way to rule out threats to internal validity in a single experiment” (APA, 2002,
p. 1054).

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About the author

Remy Low is Lecturer in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney. In his
teaching and research, Remy explores issues of cultural identity, difference, and inequality. He is also
interested in the incorporation of contemplative practices in teaching and learning. Remy Low can be
contacted at: remy.low@sydney.edu.au
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