Summer Pedagogy Program

This forty-day long program includes intensive courses in Physics, Biology, Neuroscience, Science Pedagogy, and Science/Buddhism Integration. Approximately 60 selected monastic students who have completed at least four years of the ETSI implementation phase coursework will receive in-depth training in science pedagogy as well as the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge in the respective ETSI disciplines. They will learn different learning theories, learn to create syllabi and lesson plans that they then will implement at their home institutions. After garnering monastic student feedback, the workshop participants will integrate these assessments along with their own experiential learning during subsequent pedagogy workshops to help them further refine their syllabi for subsequent years.

One unique aspect of the workshop will be a special focus on the integration of science and Buddhism.  This portion of the program will engage the topic of how science and Buddhism can complement each other on both philosophical and practical levels. By examining the nature and mechanics of both the external world and the internal psychological realm through the lens of this intersection, monastic students can enrich their worldview holistically, while becoming better positioned to demonstrate and communicate why this perspective is both meaningful and useful. Buddhist concepts like interdependence, impermanence, and relativity can draw beautiful and convincing examples from science while remaining relevant to contemplative practices. Likewise, Buddhist insights can help frame which research questions to investigate and how and why to investigate them in a variety of science disciplines, not only in the field of contemplative science. For example, monastics are uniquely positioned to make great contributions to neurophenomenology and affective and cognitive neuroscience.