4.2 Cultivating Hope Through Critically Informed Contemplative Pedagogy

Jasjit Sangha, Educational Developer, Centre for Teaching and Learning, UTSC
Paulina Rousseau, Liaison Librarian, UTSC
Kathleen Scheaffer, Strategic Initiatives and Liaison Librarian, UTM            

Amplifying the Signal: Connection, Engagement, and Civil Discourse          

Increasingly, higher education within Canada is facing shrinking resources and simultaneously educators are being challenged to engage larger class sizes with more diverse and complex needs, including the disruptions from AI. In response, the book “Hope Circuits”, Ridell (2024) invites us to reimagine the university to create campuses that are more inclusive, more human centered, less hierarchical, and more responsive to the needs of students and the context within and beyond the classroom. To achieve this, contemplative pedagogy, a critically informed and accessible teaching strategy that is rooted in Eastern wisdom and practice, is being leveraged to cultivate hope, focus, and resilience. Through a variety of contemplative practices, which explore several tools and strategies, staff, faculty, librarians, and students can begin to build aptitudes to help them stay grounded amid challenging situations, build a community of belonging, and reduce their stress and anxiety related to AI, world events, and ongoing uncertainty.

This interactive workshop will focus on contemplative pedagogy for deepened focus, self-awareness, intra and interpersonal relationships, self-management, empathy, and compassion that can be used by faculty, librarians, and staff in teaching and learning spaces (Kaplan, Review, H. B., Eurich, T., Goleman, D., & David, S., 2019). We will draw on neuroscience, Buddhist traditions, eastern spirituality and secular practices, as well as empirical research to demonstrate the history and impact of contemplative pedagogies on higher education. We will also draw from our experience holding a day long symposium for faculty, librarians and staff on this topic of "Cultivating Hope Through Critically Informed Contemplative Pedagogy" in the spring of 2026 at UTSC.