conference paper / 2009

Contemplation, Consciousness and Pedagogy

Barbara Sellers-Young

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This paper develops Sellers-Young's argument that contemplative practice can transform pedagogy by changing the quality of attention students bring to learning. She frames contemplation as a disciplined mode of awareness that works alongside analytic and sensory knowing. Breath, stillness, movement, and reflective practice become tools for cultivating presence, concentration, and responsiveness.

The essay is part of her broader effort to move performance knowledge into the academy without diluting its bodily force. It asks educators to recognize that habits of thought are also habits of body: posture, breath, perception, anxiety, and imagination shape what students can notice and understand. In this sense, contemplation becomes a practical pedagogy of embodied critical thinking, not a decorative supplement to coursework.

Metadata

Typeconference paper
Year2009
Era 2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy i

2005-2010: Reflexivity, Mimesis, Contemplation, and Institutional Pedagogy

This period broadens and complicates the earlier positions. In belly dance studies, Sellers-Young sharpens the critique of appropriation, commercialization, and the imagined Arab body. She traces belly dance from the Chicago World’s Fair and “Little Egypt” through Arab American nightlife, second-wave feminism, goddess spirituality, and branded spectacle. Enjoyment is not denied, but it is placed inside unequal histories of representation.

In “Dance, Mimesis and the Conscious Body,” she identifies different pedagogical regimes: optical, somatic, and mediated. Mirror-based training produces self-objectification and visual abstraction; direct somatic apprenticeship produces incorporation into lineage and tradition; screen-based learning produces a more autonomous but more image-mediated learner. This is one of her clearest statements that pedagogy produces kinds of consciousness.

Her work on ethnographic perspective marks a decisive methodological turn. Reflexivity must include not only social identity but sensory structure, neurological pattern, and movement history. She names the genetic/structural, imaginal/social, and performance selves. This framework later becomes central to her somatic autoethnography.

The contemplation and neuroplasticity writings connect performance training to broader academic reform. Contemplative practice is framed as a third way of knowing, complementary to rational analysis and empirical observation. Neuroscience supplies a vocabulary for attention, plasticity, habit, and embodied change, though the underlying practical insight comes from performance and somatics.

Continuity: technique forms subjectivity.

Expansion: the performance studio becomes a model for higher education.

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AuthorBarbara Sellers-Young
EventAcross the Threshold Conference, Duke University, March
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Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Contemplation, Consciousness and Pedagogy,” presented in 2009, belongs to a decisive phase in her intellectual development: the moment when long-standing concerns with embodiment, intercultural transmission, and performer training are drawn explicitly into a critique of higher education. What emerges is not simply an argument for meditation in the classroom, nor a diffuse celebration of mindfulness, but a more searching proposal about what education has historically misconstrued. The paper asks what happens if consciousness is understood not as disembodied cognition but as a bodily, environmental, and trainable process; if stillness is grasped not as passivity but as a disciplined reorganization of perception; and if...

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