学生, Faculty Forge a Thoughtful Path to a Mindful Future

学生, staff and faculty sit on meditation cushions learning a compassion practice. 他们吸入, breathing in the suffering of others, 然后呼气, giving compassion and healing to themselves and others.

This exercise is part of the Mindful Campus Program, an eight-week mindfulness series that the Renée Crown Wellness Institute began developing in 2019 and launched in spring 2021 to improve the well-being of students. 设计, 在某种程度上, 由学生, the series strives to help participants live more fully in the moment, improve participants’ mental health and wellness and boost their ability to confront big societal issues.

学生, faculty and mindfulness experts designed the program. Using data from the 2021 series, which was also the focus of a research study — which drew about 150 student participants — the team aims to analyze and hone the eight-week program. 

考特妮。凯利 20(心理), senior project manager and professional research assistant for the Crown Institute, helped design the Mindful Campus series using Youth Participatory Action 研究, a method in which young people are trained to conduct systematic research to improve their lives, their communities and the institutions intended to serve them.

As she noted, “It’s not just research about students and what students are going through. 学生参与其中.”

This method of research “allows the voices of young people to be central and guiding within the research process,索娜·迪米吉安说, director of the Crown Institute and a professor of psychology and neuroscience.

“The whole tenet is that, 作为一名研究者, I don’t know what the community needs, and I need to learn 在某种程度上nership with students and campus partners from the ground up,” 凯特琳McKimmy (MPsych’20), a graduate research assistant in Dimidjian’s laboratory.

娜塔莉·阿瓦洛斯, assistant professor of ethnic studies, noted the series includes instruction, idea-sharing and practice. 

One goal is to help participants see how they might use mindfulness and compassion practices to support anti-racism and social justice, “explicitly linking them and then going on from there,阿瓦洛斯说.

Avalos added that students assume teaching and co-mentorship roles in the Mindful Campus Program: “Hierarchies of power shifted, and I think students really responded to that and really appreciated that.”

McKimmy concurred: “At the heart of this project — and this is really an important part of the Crown Institute — is having undergrads at the table where their voices are central.”

Another team is working to adapt the Mindful Campus series into a for-credit class at CU Boulder and to make that curriculum available to students from any CU campus and other campuses, as well as community members. 

科迪Moxam (心理的23), an honors student in psychology and neuroscience, completed the series and is now part of an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty co-designing the for-credit course. He said students and faculty “set aside our personal agendas to truly work on a course designed for the well-being of its participants.”

“We were able to integrate our experience as students — and as people — with the research literature to thread together an experience that would change students’ lives for the better,Moxam说. “社区价值”, social justice and mindfulness were imbued in our team interactions from the very start.”

米歇尔·D. 辛普森, a Crown Institute faculty affiliate, research associate and associate teaching professor, underscored that point, saying that her motivation in joining the Mindful Campus Program was not to simply boost mindfulness on campus, but also to expand it into different communities on and potentially off campus.

Voicing a guiding vision for the Mindful Campus Program, 辛普森说, “Mindfulness belongs to everyone. Wellness is a right of everyone.”

Illustration by Keith Negley 

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