News
Contemplative Education Project
By Tim Martin, PhD Student
In the Fall of 2024, I travelled to Kathmandu, Nepal as a part of a two-year grant that I received to study contemplative education cross culturally. The purpose of my international travel was to select a prospective school that would be interested in our study. I quickly found a great fit in Tharlam Monastery, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery overseen by the abbot Deshung Rinpoche.
Tim Martin worked with a Tibetan Buddhist monastery
Our lab at DSCN employs the Civic Science model which seeks to enlist our “participants” as collaborators in the scientific process. By enlisting participants at the outset of a study design, we ensure that our research serves the purposes of the communities we study. We also develop a stronger rapport and investment from the community, which generally results in a higher quality of engagement. For my purposes, I wanted to ensure that my project took its time to qualitatively understand the context of Tharlam Monastery, and to thoroughly appreciate and document the interests of stakeholders in the community. So, I ventured upon a nearly two-month period of interviewing the abbot and other administrators and shadowing classes with students.
Now, back in Minnesota, I am preparing for a collaboration with Avalon School, a charter school in St. Paul. Avalon will serve as the domestic U.S. site for our study. Over the course of the Spring 2024 semester, I collaborated with an undergraduate RA Michaela Haig to evaluate mindfulness in relation to social media use amongst students at Avalon. This was an excellent opportunity for Michaela to implement her own research study and for me to begin the Civic Science model of engagement with the Avalon community. I have since met with Avalon administrators to further assess their research interests and questions about their own students. For 2025, we plan to conduct a focus group with Avalon students to see what the students want to learn about their own minds!
Ultimately, my goal is to develop a series of measures to assess the cognitive development of students in both cultural contexts for fruitful comparison. We will use well validated measures, for which Dr. Zelazo and Dr. Carlson have received considerable recognition: the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) and the Minnesota Executive Function Scale (MEFS). These measures are used widely across the field to assess executive function in children in developmentally appropriate ways. Additionally, we are hoping to implement measures that capture mindfulness, attention, emotional regulation, and empathy.