Marie Kolmos
NORENSE funding: 250.000 NOK in 2013

Short description of the project/ Research question
This doctoral thesis deals with how one can understand contemplative activities as part of the school setting and how it influences the participation, attention and well-being of the children in the subject teaching. During the last couple of years an increasing number of scientific studies have suggested that implementing contemplative activities in schools can have a beneficial effect on the well-being of the children. Contemplative activities in school settings are in the literature broadly defined as activities that foster resilience, well-being and awareness in children through a wide range of activities such as mindfulness meditation and yoga or through different kinds of artistry integrated in the school curricula. In the research literature, contemplative activities in school settings are mainly described through quantitative intervention studies investigating meditations programs typically organized as sessions delimited form the subject teaching. On that background, there is a call for theories and models that can link the contemplative activities to the everyday school life.

In my research, I am looking into school settings where contemplative activities are integrated in the everyday school life from a qualitative perspective, following a phenomenological and culture psychology logic and with the overall research question:
How are the contemplative activities part of the school setting and which implications do the activities have for the attention and participation of the children?
As for methods, I make use of ethnographic field studies, video recordings from the classrooms and interviews with teachers and students. 

The two school settings that I’m looking into is a public school where I have visited a class 6 and a Waldorf school where I have visited a class 5. The contemplative activities in the two school settings are characterised by the fact that they are interwoven in the everyday school life and as such cannot be understood as something separated from the teacher’s didactical choices and actions. In the public school the teacher is using movement to music, mini-meditation and body scan activities in her teaching sometimes as planned activities and sometimes spontaneously. In the Waldorf School the teacher is in a similar way conduction contemplative activities thus with a specific repeated rhythm throughout the day. Here the children are playing music, doing poetry and different other kinds of artistry. Both teachers implement the different ’extra’ activities in their curricula as a way to support the attention of the children and as a way to welcome the children into the classroom and as a way to create joy and well-being. The aim of this project is through the analysis of the two school settings to exemplify how teachers can work with the participation and attention of children across school settings.

Publications

Kolmos, Marie. (2020). På vejen mod trivsels- og opmærksomhedsfremmende didaktikker i skolen: Om læreres arbejde med integrerede kontemplative aktiviteter i undervisningen. (PhD). Roskilde: Roskilde Universitet. Afhandlinger fra Ph. d-skolen for Mennesker og Teknologi. Link to pdf.

Kolmos, Marie. (2019). Opmærksomhedsfremmende aktiviteter i skolen som civiliserende sceneskift. Nordic Studies in Education, 39(1).  Link to article.