Applications of Mindfulness-Based Interventions in School Settings: an Introduction

Abstract

Mindfulness as a general topic of scientific inquiry has emerged as an increasingly popular topic for social scientists, educators, and psychologists in the last 30 years. To illustrate this growing interest, one need only search for peer-reviewed publications using “mindfulness” as the primary search term. Figure 1 displays publications in academic journals that were retrieved using PsychINFO and “mindfulness” as the keyword. As of November 2015, over three thousand scientific articles have been published (n=3,350), with about one third of these articles having been published just in the last 2 years alone. What is also striking about the data displayed in this graph is not just the sheer volume of the work that is emerging, but also that the research appears to be growing at an exponential rate, suggesting an accelerating interest in the field among scholars. Indeed, given that so much time and energy is being devoted to the study of mindfulness, researchers have proposed the creation of new disciplines entirely devoted to the subject, coining such terms as contemplative science (Wallace 2006) and mindfulness psychology (Felver et al. 2013), and an entire journal (i.e.,Mindfulness) is now devoted solely to the topic. However, although the Western scientific inquiry into the construct labeled as mindfulness has clearly established itself as a general domain in social science, there remains ample opportunity to investigate how mindfulness can be applied and studied within specific subsamples and in specific settings. One such domain that has begun to receive increasing attention from the scholarly community is the application of mindfulness with youth in educational settings. Indeed, of all the studies collected in the aforementioned search, only 8 % (n=256) have involved youth under the age of 18, and only 1% (n=36) focused on youth in school settings using the keyword search terms “school,” “education,” or “classroom.” Further, among the 256 articles that have focused on mindfulness and youth, the vast majority (79 %) have been published in just the last 5 years alone (2011–2015, n=203). Mindfulness research has often been described as being in its infancy, and if this is the case, then the study ofmindfulness with youth and in schools is in the prenatal stage of development. This Special Section was developed to focus and channel the enthusiasm for applying mindfulness-based interventions into school settings by inviting leading researchers in the field to contribute their most recent work. This Special Section includes an exciting collection of cutting-edge research, including reviews of the existing work to date, outcomes from mindfulness interventions with students and teachers, and several other papers related to the topic. Two reviews of the existing literature are included in this special issue. Feagans-Gould et al. (2016) gathered 48 articles and explored the defining characteristics and implementation details of mindfulnessand yoga interventions in school settings. Felver et al. (2016) selected 28 studies that implemented mindfulness-based intervention in school settings, and coded and analyzed study characteristics across multiple domains. These reviews not only provide a snapshot of the strengths and limitations in the research conducted to date, they also provide important and timely recommendations for future research into the topic. * Joshua C. Felver jcfelver@syr.edu