Convened by Jeremy Engels (with Robert Roeser in Penn State’s College of Health and Human Development), the Institute’s Ready, Set, Pause Initiative Seeks to create a professional development workshop series to help build capacity and community among Penn State faculty who are interested in integrating contemplative practices including mindfulness and compassion training into their courses.

The workshops would provide the ability to create an enhanced experiential learning/contemplative practices component into coursework, renewing education in the Liberal Arts to include the experiential, practical learning of ethical skills (e.g., self-awareness, mindfulness, and compassion) alongside the declarative, verbal learning that characterizes much of a university classroom today. This approach to the development of intellectual and ethical values goes back millennia to the Greco-Roman and Sanskritic India traditions in which the acquisition of ethical know-how was seen as predicated on both habit learning and contemplation, as well as dialogue and debate.