Critiquing Instrumentalism in High Education: Lessons from Teaching as a Meditative Inquiry

In this conceptual and self-reflective essay, the authors begin from the premise that the contemporary higher educational institutions in Canada and many other parts of the world have increasingly tended to focus on instrumental teaching, rooted in neoliberal and capitalist ideals of societal progress through economic development. The result is that higher education centralizes making students career ready, rather than the holistic development of the student. Critical of this, Ashwani Kumar (professor of Education) and Nayha Acharya (professor of Law), undertake a collaborative effort to discuss how Kumar’s theoretical and practical concept of teaching as meditative inquiry can be an antidote to instrumentalism in higher education. In the first part of this essay, Kumar describes his concept of teaching as meditative inquiry by unfolding its theoretical rooting and giving practical examples of how he has used this approach in his teacher education and graduate education courses as well as in his doctoral seminar in contemporary educational theory at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In the second part, Acharya narrates her experimentation with the teaching as meditative inquiry approach in her Alternative Dispute Resolution course, which she teaches at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Providing concrete examples from their experiences of using a meditative inquiry approach to teaching and learning, the authors describe 1) the value of giving students the space to discover their own intrinsic relationship with the subject matter being taught, 2) how passion, authenticity and creativity can be enabled in the classroom, and 3) the challenges of adopting teaching as meditative inquiry approach in the classroom.