Education
Part of the CIHM mission is community outreach through translational research. In February 2009, we launched our first Community Outreach program: A mindfulness program for teachers. The participants in this initial project were teachers in the Waisman Center Early Childhood program. The impact of this training on teacher characteristics and classroom environment will be assessed.
Teacher course description
We offered a modified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course to teachers and staff in the Waisman Early Childhood program, a preschool housed within the Waisman Center. The course includes guided instruction in mindfulness meditation practices, gentle stretching, mindful yoga, inquiry and application into experiences of daily living, group dialogue, home assignments and audio recordings for guided home practice.
MBSR was developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and has been extensively researched as an intervention for achieving overall stress reduction and for improving health outcomes for individuals diagnosed with chronic medical conditions.
Mindfulness program for children
In 2010, we expect to begin our first outreach effort in children as part of our Children are Natural Contemplatives Initiative. This initiative is at the forefront of efforts to develop contemplative training methods appropriate to children in the K-12 years and to develop assessment tools -- both behavioral and biological -- that specifically target the characteristics that might be transformed through contemplative training.
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© 2009 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
