This Work-in-Progress Research Paper examines the use of contemplative pedagogy for cultivating empathetic and compassionate learning environments in engineering education. Contemplation - often associated with heightened awareness and presence of mind - is comprised of such practices as deep listening, beholding, and meditation, which engage participants in intentional reflection, consideration, and thoughtful observation. Contemplative pedagogy supports participants, individually and collectively, in engaging deeply with themselves and the world by emphasizing empathy, compassion, self-compassion, and creativ-ity. Traditional engineering education engages students predom-inantly in cognitive ways of knowing. In comparison, contem-plative pedagogy creates learning environments that transcend cognition, thereby infusing emotional and embodied knowing into the educational paradigm. Such learning spaces can empower students to access their whole selves in their educational journeys and foster empathy, compassion, self-compassion, and ultimately, belonging to the learning process and learning environment. This paper describes two participants' journeys in one undergraduate physics foundation course delivered at a small, private, non-traditional, engineering college, where students were invited to engage with course content through contemplative pedagogy, including approximately weekly reflective assignments. Each assignment invited students to engage with meditation, curated contemplative activities, and contemplative readings in addition to the technical content. Two of the eighteen students enrolled both consented to participate in the study and engaged with every reflective assignment. Participants' data were analyzed as an instrumental case study using narrative and thematic approaches to allow for emergent phenomena to surface. We find that contemplative pedagogy offers students a scaffolding to reflect on themselves, the world, and the relationship between the two. As well the transformative power of contemplative pedagogy is affected by the participant's focus and orientation toward contemplative practices: one student focused on internal growth and experienced feelings of empowerment through improved connection with themself; another student focused on facilitating growth in others and did not perceive transformational changes.

This Special Session will provide a theoretical and experiential understanding of contemplative pedagogies and how they can be used to create learning spaces that foster belonging. Contemplative pedagogies embrace all aspects of students' authentic selves to create more inclusive learning environments that honor and engage diverse ways of knowing and being. By providing an introspective frame for engaging with course content, contemplative pedagogies allow students to integrate their identities and experiences into the learning process, thereby finding greater meaning and connection to the world around them. In engineering education, contemplative pedagogies have been shown to have a myriad of benefits including enhancing learning, well-being, productivity, self-awareness, empathy, and communication. In addition, contemplative pedagogies engender trust and belonging by inviting students to co-create their learning experiences in compassionate learning spaces. This Special Session will invite participants to engage with contemplative pedagogies while also gaining the knowledge and skills necessary to apply them in their own local contexts. Specifically, through both interactive lecture and experiential practice, participants will be introduced to a set of contemplative pedagogies that are transferrable to diverse learning environments. This session is intended for all audiences who support students' learning so that they can engage these practices in fostering a personal and collective sense of belonging for their respective student populations.

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper introduces contemplative practices as a way of creating compassionate and empathetic learning spaces in engineering education. Contemplation refers to thoughtful observation, reflection, consideration, or intention, sometimes associated with deeper awareness and sense of presence. As such, contemplative practices – both individual and communal, internal, and external – allow for an emergence of deeper meaning of self and the world through the development of compassion, empathy, connectedness, and creativity. Newly emerging in higher education, contemplative pedagogies bring students’ authentic selves into the learning process, fostering a personal and collective sense of belonging, inclusion, and engagement of all student’s diverse ways of knowing and being. This is particularly important in today’s engineering education where the disinclination to include diverse students’ senses of self as they uncompassionately learn to build the technology of the future is harmful for that same future they attempt to build. This paper presents an Innovative Practice that brings together a plethora of contemplative pedagogies in two undergraduate engineering courses – a Physics Foundation and an intermediate-level Social Science courses. To assess the effectiveness of this innovation, we use students’ weekly reflective assignments that demonstrate an emerging sense of trust and belonging. We also find that contemplative pedagogies create a scaffolding for students’ development of compassion, self-compassion, and empathy – educational outcomes that are otherwise absent in their engineering education. Students report a sense of palpable personal growth and self-discovery as well as an opportunity to reexamine science and engineering through the lenses of their diverse ways of knowing and being. Many reflect on a sense of integration of one’s sense of self into an otherwise sterile engineering education devoid of subjective, caring, and heart.

In this pre-conference workshop, we present the ways in which contemplative and mindfulness practices can serve to democratize engineering education. Contemplative practices allow individuals to gain a deeper understanding of themselves, others and their context by integrating the body - both, its physical and affective expressions - and mind. Despite the benefits of these practices for creating learning environments that are authentic, purposeful, holistic, and inclusive, these pedagogies are underutilized in engineering curricula. In this workshop, we will provide an immersive introduction to contemplative practices to co-create a sense of what engineering education environments can look like when they employ mindful, affective, and embodied ways of knowing. Participants will leave with a toolkit of contemplative practices, including sensory and visual meditation, deep listening, beholding, contemplative movement, and critical reflection, which will equip them to reimagine the ways in which they promote students' capacity for self-awareness and reflection in their own learning contexts. Rooted in the practices of mindfulness, these strategies allow the co-creation of environments that are more conducive to learning and inclusive of all ways of knowing and being, thereby democratizing engineering education.