Institute Focus

In the last few years, Honors Programs and Honors Colleges have navigated the challenges of helping students, faculty, and staff face pandemic stress, resist apathy, and shift between multiple mediums of instruction.

While there is no panacea to these or future challenges, the current workshop introduces administrators, staff, and/or faculty to mindfulness as a practice for supporting and nurturing successful and caring communities of learners.

In this workshop, we take mindfulness to mean a holistic set of engaged activities that have the purpose of bringing individuals to live a sense of balance and peace, grounded in the nonjudgmental experience of the present moment. The workshop will use this understanding of mindfulness as a practice to address the tendency in Honors communities (faculty, staff, and students) to become overcommitted without considering the why behind our work (Owens & Giazzoni, JNCHC, 5.1, 2010). Drawing from evidence-based research (Coleman and Dotter, JNCHC 2020, Greeson et al Journal Of American College Health, 2014), the facilitators will introduce participants to different forms of mindfulness practice and ways to integrate mindfulness into the curriculum and honors communities.

Audience

This session is designed for honors faculty, staff, and administrators who are interested in enhancing their program or college. (Unsure if this session is for you? Contact a facilitator for more information.)

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

• • Become knowledgeable about the research on how mindfulness could positively impact mental health, academic success, and overall well-being.
• • Learn how to introduce and teach mindfulness practices for honors faculty/staff and student populations.
• • Learn how to practice mindful leadership in order to create and support a mindful honors community.
• • Develop ways to integrate mindfulness into Honors curriculum and learning outcomes.

Tentative Schedule

View the Event Agenda

Facilitators

Scott O'Leary, North Carolina State University

Scott O’Leary is currently Director of the Honors and Scholars Village at North Carolina State University. His work focuses on the phenomenology of everyday experience, in particular the way emotions frame experience frames consciousness, value constitution, and choice. He is a 200-hour Certified Yoga Instructor and is certified in Koru Mindfulness, having taught Koru for the past two years with honors students.

Allison Kellar, Wingate University

Allison Kellar is Founding Dean of the Honors College and Associate Professor of English at Wingate University, where she has developed and supported the Honors community as a director since 2014. Her scholarship and teaching interests include drama and adaptation studies; health humanities; and well-being and mindfulness practices in Honors curricular and co-curricular programming. She is currently in the process of becoming a KORU Mindfulness certified instructor.

Questions? Contact the NCHC office at (402) 472-9150 or hello@nchchonors.org