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Cultural Competence Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: Talking culturally responsive teaching with Dr Remy Low
In this episode, we are delighted to be joined by…
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
The Cultural Competence Collective comes to you from Unceded Gadigal country at the University of Sydney. This country is a place of deep history and connection and I honour the enduring connection of the Gadigal people to this land. I would like to pay my respects to elders past, present and future, who have always had and will continue to have custodianship of this beautiful land.
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A
As academics or as teachers, you know, we become enamored with kind of abstract ideas and concepts, but at the heart of it, or at the root of it, we became interested because it spoke to us in a particular way. And so how can we create activities, create discussions in classrooms where students can bring themselves in to the content and perhaps make some of those connections for themselves, whatever those connections might look like.
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B
Welcome to today's episode of the Cultural Competence Collective. My name is Pooja Biswas and I'm from the National Centre for Cultural Competence here on Unceded Gadigal country at the University of Sydney. In this episode, we'll be joined by Dr. Remy Lowe, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney's School of Education and Social Work. Remy is committed to advancing culturally responsive education in diverse contexts such as early childhood centres, schools, arts and cultural institutions and community organisations. This informs their teaching, research and public engagement, which focus on two themes, the social factors that shape experiences of education and the practices that foster responsiveness in educators, educational leaders and education programs. Hi, Remy. It's such a pleasure to talk to you today.
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A
Thank you, Pooja. And thank you for having me on this podcast. I like to begin also by acknowledging that I am recording this podcast and discussing with you on Gadigal Country, a place where discussions and dialogue has happened for many, many millennia. So I'm very grateful to traditional custodians this country.
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B
Wonderful. Thanks so much, Remy. To start us off, I'll ask you a question that I ask all our guests, which is, what does cultural competence mean to you?
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A
I guess generally when we talk about culture, what we mean is certain behaviors, patterns, ideas, practices that prevail within a particular social group, all of us are products of culture in that sense, and so defined. And cultural competence, I think, is about acknowledging that our particular ways of behaving, our particular ways of seeing the world, our particular ways of knowing and approaching things, are products of a specific culture. Inevitably and in that acknowledgment, then opening ourselves up to other people's practices, behaviors, perspectives and ways of seeing the world, and then how do we effectively work together, given our cultural differences? Towards common ends.
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B
That's an incredible place to start. Thank you. Thanks, Remy. You've. You've probably said it better than I could, actually.
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A
I'm not sure about that, but thank you for your encouragement.
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B
So, you know, looking at your career and your publications, you're obviously very deeply interested in culturally responsive education. So how and when did you develop that interest? What experiences guided you towards it?
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A
So I guess perhaps it's a helpful place to start to say that I was a high school teacher in various parts of Sydney, and Sydney being Sydney, those various parts, various geographical locations also entailed very diverse communities depending on where I was. And so as a teacher I was very interested in thinking about, you know, how do I make the content, the knowledge that I wanted to convey to students, come alive in a way that was responsive to their needs, their questions, their lives. It's not always easy, you know, how do you teach about tundra to 14 year olds at 2pm after lunch on a 40 degree day? But I think for teachers it's not an unexciting challenge, you know, what is the relevance of tundra to these 14 year olds? And so I guess my interest in culturally responsive pedagogy started as a high school teacher in those contexts because ultimately culturally responsive pedagogy is about working with diverse student bodies, diverse student interests and needs and backgrounds, and making the content kind of relevant to them in a particular way. And as people who do culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy will say, it's not just for, quote, unquote, culturally diverse students, it's for all students. You know, at 2:00pm, 14 year old students at 2:00pm on a 40 degree day. Our world needs some form of culturally responsive pedagogy to make content about tundra come alive. So culturally responsive pedagogy is about how do we make content, how do we make knowledge relevant, meaningful and come alive to students depending on where they're at and where they've come from? I guess perhaps it speaks a little bit to my own experiences of being a student and the teachers and educational experiences that I was drawn to. Teachers and educational experiences that made content come alive and meaningful in a way that I still, you know, hold and, you know, content that's still meaningful for me today. Yeah, so I guess in a nutshell, that's my. Where my interest in culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy comes from. I guess also, I might mention, all of us have also had experiences of sitting in classrooms where the opposite is true.
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B
Oh yes.
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A
Where information and knowledge is conveyed to us in a way that does not speak to us at all, is not relevant to us, perhaps is mistimed on a 40 degree day after lunch or is just kind of thrown at us from a textbook. And you know, we barely remember what those classes and those lessons are about. So, yeah, I guess for me that's where culturally responsive pedagogy has been compelling.
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B
I especially like how you talked about the fact that culturally responsive pedagogies are about truly engaging with students and in order to do that, establishing a sense of connection or community that everyone is, you know, feels included in rather than excluded from. I also really liked when you, when you mentioned 14 year olds because, you know, as someone with nieces of that age, there's a sort of culture just in that age group as well, you know, which is. So when we're talking about, as you said, culture isn't just about what stereotypically comes to people's minds in terms of, you know, oh, well, you know, quote unquote, cultural diversity. All of us have culture in so many different ways. It can be based on where we come from, what language you speak at home, what age we are, our peer groups, and so on. I really love that. What sort of challenges do you face, you know, in terms of making an educational program or some sort of educational content, as you said, engaging, accessible for a very diverse cohort? So what sort of challenges do you face and are there any solutions that you've come across or seen other people come across in your practice?
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A
I don't have a big S solution. And in fact, I think with culturally responsive teaching and culture responsive pedagogy in education, we try to get away from the idea that there is one big S solution to engaging students and making content meaningful. And that's because not only do classes and cohorts differ from one another, they're diverse in that sense. But as you said, we are different in so many ways. And culture is not simply just some container that we're either in one container or the other container. We're all complex configurations of various influences. And that adds to the difficulty and the challenge and the complexity of this task of how to make education culturally responsive and make content meaningful and engaging. So I guess, yeah, the first short answer to your question is no, I have no big S solutions. But with culturally responsive teaching, pedagogy, culturally responsive education, there are some principles. So one is precisely what I've said. Get rid of the idea that there is one way to teach because that prevents adaptability.
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B
And what's actually happening with the students?
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A
Absolutely. Yeah. I think, you know, it's not unusual for us to have a bias for the ways that we teach. And usually those biases are from the way that we prefer to learn. So, for example, I like to doodle when I'm listening. So, you know, I find in my teaching that I'm inclined to doodle on the whiteboard. But I acknowledge that for many students that that may be, you know, odd or perhaps not completely helpful. You know, it might be distracting.
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B
Yeah, it sounds very interesting. And I'm a. I'm a doodler as well. So all of my school notebooks have sort of lots of things around the margin.
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A
Well, we're common doodlers. So. So, you know, if I was teaching you or you were teaching me, then, you know, obviously doodling would work very well. But I think it's acknowledging that students come to us differently, and hence our approach to them should also be different. So I guess that's the first thing to acknowledge that there is no one surefire solution, one big S solution. So what do we do from that? And so I guess the first part of a response to your question is to say, well, perhaps try to find out a little bit more about the students that we're working with. So for me, if I'm designing a class or a program or a workshop, it's getting as much information as I can about, you know, who I'm going to be interacting with in the educational space. If I'm working in higher education context, you know, trying to get some, you know, basic demographic data about my incoming students. If it's about designing a workshop in a public context or a community context, it's working with those community organizations or cultural institutions to say, well, who are your audience? You know, what types of people come to these workshops or these programs? What speaks to them? Have you found asking people who might know better from the community that might give you some pointers about what is meaningful? And then I guess once we are in an educational context, in a classroom or in a workshop context, it's always checking ourselves. Are we making kind of assumptions about what people want to hear or what people want to. How people want to learn and opening ourselves up to the feedback that we might be getting from the people that we're face to face with in the
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B
process of sort of getting feedback? How do you go about doing that in educational contexts? And, you know, in terms of getting to know one's students, do you feel that perhaps having activities with some degree of, you know, self determination can help show who the person is or what other sort of methods have you come across to get to know your student cohort once they're in the classroom?
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A
I think that's exactly the approach. I would suggest activities that involve some sort of self determination, I guess, activities where they can bring themselves in to the content. And I know this looks different for different disciplines and different subjects, but one way to think about it is for all of us. You know, we. We became interested in various disciplines and different strands of knowledge because it spoke to us in some way. So I guess that's maybe not a bad place to start, you know, how did it become meaningful to us? You know, I speak to people who are interested in physics, for example, who are physicists, and they tell me, yeah, you know, had this experience when I was on the school, back of the school bus, you know, and, and those sen. And asking ourselves what got us interested in a particular topic in the first place. And maybe not necessarily then assuming that everyone is interested in the same way, but realizing that, yes, as academics or as teachers, we become enamored with kind of abstract ideas and concepts, but at the heart of it or at the root of it, we became interested because it spoke to us in a particular way. And so how can we create activities, create discussions, create, you know, tasks in classrooms where students can bring themselves in to the content and perhaps make some of those connections for themselves, whatever those connections might look like.
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B
How do you bring mindfulness into. Into that space?
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A
Wow. So you have really cased and read through some of my publications. I gu. The first thing to kind of knock over is what is mindfulness? And I guess, first and foremost, mindfulness is a particular quality. It's a quality that we bring to classrooms, but it's a quality that perhaps we might say we bring to life. It's a general sense of awareness, awareness of ourselves first, what's going on for us, awareness of, like we said before, our own biases and preferences. And then from there, also awareness of what's going on around us and the people that we're with. And so going back to the question about tasks in class that can involve students bringing themselves into the classroom, you know, mindfulness might look like being open to how a student might make a connection between the content and their own experiences. And it may not be necessarily the connection that we make. And I think that's part of the joy of being in a classroom. Is it not like, you know, to see students make connections that we had not anticipated?
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B
Oh, absolutely. I think that's One of the things that, you know, brings me a lot of joy is the aliveness of a classroom environment and, you know, every individual student bringing something different to the classroom and taking away something different from it as well. And then of course, the way the group interacts with each other and each single one is different because the dynamics, the interplay between everyone present is unique and that it's a very organic and alive process teaching. And I think that's where I agree with you that you know, like a big S solution would actually be restrictive and wouldn't actually be a solution because there's just so much going on and you know, so much sort of dynamic activity going on there. I really liked how you sort of, you know, described bringing mindfulness in in some of your research. You also mentioned McMindfulness. Is that something that can be a pitfall sometimes? What can we do as educators to avoid it if it is?
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A
Wow, big questions. Look, McMindfulness is a term that emerged kind of in the 2000s to describe certain ways that mindfulness was being taken up in predominantly in the, in North America, but also places like the uk, Australia, perhaps Europe, to some extent, basically kind of wealthier, heavily industrialized nations. And it's a critique of a particular way that mindfulness was taken up as just a way of relieving stress from overstressed workers primarily, especially in kind of corporate sectors, so that they can, you know, take 20 minutes out to, to do some sort of meditation or breath exercise and then go back and be more productive. And I think mindfulness as a term was designed to kind of critique that take up of mindfulness, which a lot of scholars and a lot of practitioners felt was a betrayal of what mindfulness practice from various traditions was, was meant to be about. And so mindfulness is, for example, applying it to culturally responsive teaching. It's, it might, might look like creating assessments and classroom situations that are extremely stressful for your students, completely perhaps non responsive in a way that is very triggering or unresponsive to them, and then including some sort of breath and mindfulness exercise so they can de stress for three minutes before you put them through a very stressful regime again. And so mindfulness is kind of critiquing that. It's saying, well no, you don't just plug mindfulness into a program or a system that is fundamentally unresponsive, fundamentally perhaps
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B
unjust, because the system itself is not mindful.
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A
Correct. And that's exactly Pooja. And that's, I think what the critique is trying to say, you know, that yeah. The spirit of mindfulness is an awareness of oneself, an awareness of others, an awareness of. Of this world and this environment that we live in. And you can't plug in that type of awareness into a system or into a program that is unaware of the larger implications of what's going on.
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B
We tend to commodify students sometimes. Perhaps it comes from industrialization, but the importance of usefulness, productivity, the amount of work that gets done per hour, and. And therefore, trying to bring that sort of mindfulness into the situation doesn't resolve the issues that actually cause stress and distress. What do you think are the causes for the things that cause the lack of mindfulness in systems or in educational institutions?
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A
In my research with culturally responsive teaching and pedagogy, the literature is quite big at this point. And I found, I guess for me, that there was a lot of emphasis on the culture respect, and rightly so. You know, so there was a lot of analysis about, you know, how certain dominant cultures in a particular context frame education and shape education to the kind of sidelining or perhaps even exclusion of other cultures and other perspectives and so on. I myself teach this in my classes that, you know, in every context, there is a dominant culture and a majoritarian kind of culture that shapes how education is run, how classrooms are operated. And, you know, it's right to critique that and to challenge that. But then I realized that actually it's. The responsive piece was perhaps less researched and less discussed in this space of culturally responsive education and teaching. Once we know that, yes, this is how culture operates, and this is how, you know, dominant and subordinate and excluded cultures work. And. And we want to challenge that. Well, the question is, then, how do we do it and do we have the capacity to do it? And this is where, for me, I started doing a lot of reading and research into the, you know, responsiveness. How does responsiveness work? What are the factors, biologically, psychologically, socially that mitigate responsiveness? And that opened up a whole field for me because I came to realize that in many ways, biologically, psychologically, socially, we're not built to be responsive. We're built to, you know, shortcut. We're built to. We're built to be biased because in many ways it serves us well. So I realized that actually responsiveness was a real. Itself was a really challenging thing. You know, we. We don't 100% respond to others or to the world ever. You know, we usually respond through the filter of, as we mentioned before, our own cultural and social upbringing, our perspectives and positions in society, and so responsiveness itself is, Is. Is not an easy task. We, we tend to, you know, filter things through what we want to see and what we expect to see. And so mindfulness was interesting to me because it was this practice of being actually kind of aware and kind of, in a way, opening the aperture to both what we're feeling, but also to the world and others. Opening the aperture for a moment, withholding judgment of ourselves and others just for a moment, so that we can let in the light, so to speak, a little bit.
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B
What do you think might lead systems to be culturally unresponsive?
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A
Yep.
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Or, you know, sometimes even, you know, outright hostile?
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Yes. Yes.
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You know, to changes that might take them towards true mindfulness?
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A
Yes.
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B
Is part of that the kind of the natural tendency that we all have as individuals and of course, when we put ourselves into organizations, that's kind of what presents itself? Or is there something else that could also be at work there?
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A
I'm going to be a classic academic here and just say, please do. It's all of those things. I think. So, like I said, you know, we, I think biologically and psychologically, we are in many ways engineered not to be responsive. We're engineered to kind of make shortcuts, you know, cognitively through, you know, heuristic mechanisms. But also biologically, you know, we, we tend to kind of filter experiences that we might be having through past experiences and understand it in that way. So I do think there is a natural human disposition to shortcutting and bias. But I do think you're right to say that programs and systems can also condition us and build on top of that biological basis. So, for example, institutions are part of that conditioning. They do encourage us to see the world in a particular way, to see others in a particular way. And that forms part of that filter and that conditioning and that biasing system. So, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I would say one of the big things that we need to look at when we talk about culturally responsive education or teaching are the institutional, institutional practices and institutional policies that mitigate responsiveness. I'll give you a basic example because, you know, it might sound really abstract, right. But for example, if we load up classroom teachers with a lot of expectations about what has to be covered in a 50, 60 minute slot, I suggest that that may not encourage responsiveness because if the classroom teacher in a university or in a high school classroom, a primary school class, early childhood, or a community development program feels like they need to cover all this material, you know, what latitude do they have to let the light in, as we said before, to open up the aperture to individual differences.
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B
So autonomy is really important for teachers in order for them to be culturally responsive.
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A
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I like the word autonomy because I think sometimes we. We think, oh, you know, giving teachers autonomy, like, oh, no, they can do whatever they want. Autonomy is giving people some space and honoring the teachers that we have and giving them space to, you know, get to know the students that they're working with and then to adjust the material in ways that are compelling or interesting to the students that they have.
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B
Could you go more into what sort of, you know, you mentioned sort of biological and psychological processes that, you know, that make mindfulness perhaps not innately a biological thing that we can, you know, easily rely on. So what sort of processes are those?
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A
In the past, we used to study the sociologists run off and study society. Historians look at the past, and then you might have neuroscientists doing FMRI on very specific niche kind of questions or topics. And then psychologists will look at cognitive processes within very specific cohorts in their randomized control trials. But I think what's exciting in the current moment is that a lot of these disciplines that used to work in silos are coming together and talking and forming interdisciplinary groups. And that's exciting because it gives us a fuller picture of how these processes might work. And they work in a very trendy metaphor these days, in a kind of a feed forward and feedback kind of loop. We are all conditioned and are brought up in what's called a culture, a society, you know, a particular way that things are done, a way of seeing the world that our carers and parents might teach us, our peer groups. And we grew up in what's called, I guess, you know, a culture, a way of seeing the world, a way of behaving, a way of understanding what's right and wrong. And that gets, in a way, coded into our biology. Our nervous systems are organized around that type of cultural upbringing. So, for example, you know, I often say to my students, like, think about what you ate for dinner last night, and if you unpack that, you know, you can see how this works, right? It's on one level, it's biology. You're hungry, and so you seek something to eat for dinner, you know, but it's never just about biology, is it? Because what you choose to eat for dinner and what do you recognize as being delicious and not delicious is filtered through, you know, what. What cognitive psychologists would say call schemas, right, categories of what is acceptable or not acceptable food. Delicious or not delicious food that activates your biology, then you salivate and so on. And what makes those concepts of good or bad food or tasty or not delicious food compelling? It's because of your social, cultural upbringing. So that's how those systems kind of lock into each other. The social, the psychological, and the biological. You know, some food might be completely smelly to some people and completely utterly delicious to others. You know, I've just come back from a trip to Malaysia and it's durian season. And I don't want to bring up durian on the NCCC podcast because I know it can be a very, very divisive topic. In fact, probably the most divisive topic. And I don't know if we're ready for that discussion yet, but let's. But, but that's a good example. You know, for me it's sublime. And for others it's is a nightmare. And is it because durian is objectively horrible or objectively delicious? Well, no, it depends on a lot, on your, you know, the interplay of your biology, your psychology, and your social, cultural upbringing. So those are those. How those interplays work.
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B
I think so much of how we leave our lives is instinctual and perhaps fed by a lot of subconscious processes or experiences that have influenced us on levels that even we may not be aware of. And which is why, of course, mindfulness is so important, is becoming aware of ourselves, which then opens, as you said, opens the aperture. I love that phrase. Opens the aperture to being able to perceive the rest of the world mindfully. Last year in November 2024, we had a conference at the NCCC and you had this wonderful workshop of which I was very privileged. I was very privileged to attend. I found so much of what you mentioned so fascinating when you were talking about workplace stress and the kind of fears that we develop as educators because of all the various expectations placed upon us. And as you said, there's a lot of, of pressure on, like productivity or on delivering specific course outcomes or delivering specific curricula. And one of the really fascinating things that you mentioned was a bacteria that sort of seek out sugar and they sort of, you know, and how the sort of the instinct to avoid pain and to seek out positive experiences can sort of shape us as, as human beings, but also as educators. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that for our listeners?
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A
So the point of raising the bacteria is just to show that at a biological level, we, we tend to move towards things that bring us kind of either pleasure or comfort. And you Know, all biological beings tend to kind of withdraw or evade things that appear to them to be painful or dangerous or threatening. And that's a very, that's simple biological fact. And what makes humans, I mean, in many ways us as humans are continuous with that. We tend to move towards things that we think are pleasurable or comforting or secure. And we tend to kind of withdraw from things that we find threatening or dangerous or painful. Except for us, we have mechanisms, the psychological, cognitive mechanisms and the social and cultural mechanisms layered on top of that very biological, you know, disposition to move towards certain things and move away from certain things. When we see things that we are not perhaps conditioned to find good or pleasurable or pleasant, you know, we will have an aversive reaction. And I guess part of what you, you know, what we're talking about, part of mindfulness is, you know, noticing that you have an aversive reaction and not acknowledging, I guess, what you and the triple C team might call, you know, like unconscious bias, right? You, you have an aversive reaction to something and you stop and saying, okay, I'm not feeling, you know, particularly pleasant about this encounter or this thing. And, and that's okay, you know, I'm not a bad person for having necessarily an aversive reaction. And to treat that with curiosity. I guess that's what mindfulness is about, right? It's acknowledging what's going on for us in a non judgmental way. Just coming at it with curiosity, like, okay, I'm feeling this thing. How have I come to feel this thing? Why am I feeling this thing? You know, is it because I'm encountering someone or a perspective that is different from mine, acknowledging that I'm being activated in that way and acknowledging that, yeah, there is a very embodied dimension to this. Right? That we do tend to kind of have aversive reactions to things that seem to us to be dangerous or threatening. And so at a bodily level, we need to address that, acknowledge it, perhaps take a few deep breaths just to calm ourselves down when we have those sorts of reactions and then to ask ourselves, yeah, where does it come from? Is it it genuinely a threat or a danger? Or is it just that it's a perspective or a person who is unfamiliar to me or a situation that's unfamiliar to me? And I guess that's, that goes to the root of what it means to be responsive and not reactive, which I would say is the, is the kind of opposite of responsiveness, kind of a reactiveness to things that, yeah, in many ways, as we've Said like, you know, is understandable based on our biology, based on our psychological processes, based on the fact that we all grow up in specific social and cultural contexts. But perhaps not most useful if you want to be a responsive educator in the classroom or in community spaces.
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B
Do you find, when you're attempting to implement mindfulness in a classroom, what sort of things have you come across? Do you sometimes run into barriers within students when you're trying to deliver a sort of mindful pedagogy?
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A
Yes, is the answer to that question. And all the time, and I guess there's a few parts to that question. The first, I guess I would say is as you've asked, what barriers and what challenges do I face trying to cultivate a more, more mindful classroom, both for myself as an educator, but also amongst my students, you know, mindfulness of an awareness of one another and of themselves. And then the second part of your question, I guess is also what? Yeah, I guess the implied question is also like, you know, is there resistance to the idea of mindfulness and being mindful? I'll tackle the, the latter first, which is, I think I defined mindfulness earlier in the podcast as awareness of oneself and awareness of others and awareness of the environment and the world that we're in. And I defined it in that way because I want us to get away a little bit from a very stereotypical sense of what mindfulness is. And I think part of the problem with talking about mindfulness is that we've muddied the concept. So I think as soon as you say the word mindfulness, people have images of like sitting cross legged on the floor and you know, like with kind of contorted hand position, you know, postures and things like that. And yes, you know, that type of mindfulness practice, sitting meditation, it's called, is one way of training mindfulness. Specifically from South Asian and subcontinent. That has been a very strong and powerful tradition of mindful practice, you know, sitting meditation, you know, from say historically the, the kind of, the Vedic or Buddhist traditions where you basically just sit and, and you know, watch yourself, want to fidget and you know, just sit with that and, and, and notice the thoughts that come up and just, just sit with that and breathe and so on. But that is just one way of practicing mindfulness. And my interest, as you said, with a lot of my work and research is looking at how mindfulness defined as awareness of oneself, awareness of others, awareness of environment and world is cultivated in different ways. So there's not one way of practicing mindfulness and training People in mindfulness, there are numerous ways and I'm still learning and opening myself to learning, learning from various traditions. So, you know, sometimes, you know, primary school teachers will speak to me and be like, I want to do mindfulness in my classrooms, you know, but it's really hard to get, you know, my students to sit still. And I'm like, yeah, maybe sitting still is, is okay, but I don't know, I, I would find different ways of teaching a four year old or a six year old mindfulness than making them sit still cross legged with their eyes closed.
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B
As a parent of a nine year old, I, I sympathize with the difficulty of getting kids to sit still.
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A
Yes, indeed. So I think, I guess that knocks over, not knock, but like, it, it addresses the first part of your question, which is like, do students have a. What if students have a resistance to mindfulness in that way? And then, you know, in a way I don't perhaps blame them, you know, being forced to sit still with your eyes closed in awkward kind of cross legged positions and stuff. I think maybe there's a resistance to that. And so I think it's important for educators who are interested in introducing mindfulness and practicing mindfulness in their classrooms to look at different ways. But for example, I'll offer some examples of what I mean by that. So, you know, I invite podcast listeners now, or us here to just notice what they're feeling or how they're feeling. And perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being you wish you stayed in bed and 10 being you know, you're ready to party, where's your energy and emotional level at right now? If you tried that exercise, you might have given yourself a number. And I'm eight at the moment because I'm having a great conversation.
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B
Oh my goodness, was I supposed to.
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A
I would probably possibly 10 if I wasn't, you know, recovering from a cold as well. But, but you know, eight and eight and a half.
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B
Yeah.
- [37:55]
A
And just notice how in that simple exercise, I've invited us to tune in to just how we're feeling. You know, are we feeling energized or not energized? Are we feeling positive or negative? Right. And so in that simple exercise, we've become mindful of how we are going and other simple exercises to look around the room that you're currently sitting in, or if you're listening to this podcast on the train or you know, in the bathroom. I don't know where people listen to podcasts these days while you're in the bathtub. Look around in the room you're at and notice perhaps three objects or features of the room that you didn't notice when you first entered it. And so you see that that's a mindfulness exercise for awareness of what's going on around us. And in none of those exercises did I invite you all to kind of have to do that Google Images thing of mindfulness where, you know, you're sitting cross legged in the lotus position with a contorted hand posture. Although that, I must admit, you know, that is a very, very powerful practice from a very powerful spiritual and cultural tradition. It's not the only way of practicing and training in mindfulness. So there are many, many ways and invite educators who want to, you know, bring mindfulness into their classrooms to explore those different ways. So that's one answer to your question. You know, if try different methods to get students to get ourselves to open the aperture and to notice ourselves, others and the world. Perhaps it's a deep listening exercise, just, you know, having one, having putting students in pairs and having a student speak to a topic for, you know, 40 seconds or a minute uninterrupted while the other just listens and then vice versa and then getting the pair partners to repeat what the other person said. And you can see from that simple exercise that it tunes students to each other.
- [39:59]
B
It's so wonderful that, you know, you've been able to give us concrete examples of, you know, different ways of practicing mindfulness other than what might stereotypically, you know, come to people's minds who haven't, you know, who haven't been able to do much research or thinking about it. So we're very, very grateful for the time you've given us today. Remy, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
- [40:25]
A
Thank you so much for this invitation and for these excellent questions. They've really gotten me to think more deeply about the work that I've done. But no, I've really appreciated this opportunity. So thank you, Pooja.
- [40:36]
B
Thank you so much. Remy. You've been listening to the Cultural Competence Collective, where each story invites us to think more deeply about who we are, how we connect and the systems we shape. This podcast was produced by project officer Adobe Plange, academic facilitator Amy McHugh and senior external producer Sarah Mashman. Thank you to designer Zayn Arif, who created our podcast artwork. If you're interested in reading the works of today's guest, you can find links to their research in our show notes.