First campaigns for The Big Beacon, a global movement for the transformation of engineering education, will start next week after Memorial Day. Readers of ThreeJoy Associates’ blog can get a sneak preview of the Big Beacon website here. The minds, hearts, and hands campaign poster is reproduced below.
For more information go to the website (here) or read the Big Beacon Manifesto here.
Over the course of the last couple of weeks two books have popped up on the radar screen that suggest something interesting is afoot with respect to mindfulness practice. Chade-Meng Tan’s book Search Inside Yourself (here) describes a course offered at Google to help managers and engineers become more mindful at work. Daniel Goleman of emotional intelligence fame writes a foreword to the book as does mindfulness guru, Jon Kabat-Zinn. The first chapter title, Even an Engineer Can Thrive on Emotional Intelligence, gives a sense of the tone and tenor of the remaining chapters.
Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan (D) has just completed A Mindful Nation (here) in which he talks about how mindfulness practice might help America recapture its spirit. Chapter 4 is especially useful to those interested in education.
Taken alone, the two books are interesting additions to growing technical and spiritual literatures of mindfulness. Taken together, it seems that they signal that something is afoot with respect to mindfulness and its moving to the mainstream. The growing scientific support for mindfulness practice (for example, Dan Siegel’s Mindsight here) and the growing application of these ideas in practice in such mainstream organizations as Google and Congress suggest that it should soon become possible to discuss these topics at work and in the classroom more widely with less eye rolling and greater seriousness.
ThreeJoy’s mainline training programs in NLQ (noticing-listening-questioning), TASL (teaching as servant leadership), and POCA (personal and organizational change agency) emphasize noticing and awareness against a backdrop of established mindfulness practices. For more information write deg@threejoy.com.
When I attended Brian Bomeisler’s course (here) based on his mom’s book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, he showed us Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk Stroke of Insight. Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroscientist who had a strong stroke that shut down the language centers on the left side of her brain. In her video, she goes onto describe both scientifically and emotionally her unique experience in a very moving way. ThreeJoy works with clients to find the joy, happiness, and peace in educational settings, and her description of the stroke has much in common with mindfulness practices that emphasize quieting the mind and feeling a larger connectedness to others.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
ThreeJoy believes that these practices and an emphasis on noticing and mindfulness are important to the transformation of engineering education around the world (see earlier post here). For more on Jill Bolte Taylor and her work go here.