Learn about a mindfulness-based writing activity to help learners process course material and support their wellbeing beyond the classroom.

I was in graduate school during the pandemic, balancing my work as a student with my work as a graduate teaching assistant, and this experience had a major effect on me and my pedagogy. Like many others in higher education, this period of time led me to a new awareness of the stresses and burdens placed on our learners. This, in turn, prompted my first forays into incorporating mindfulness into my teaching practices, which led to the activity I’m sharing in this blog post.

Assignment Context

I was about a year into the pandemic (Spring 2021) and teaching an introduction to poetry class when I used this mindfulness activity for the first time. The class introduced learners to the genre by assigning and discussing poetry collections and writing and workshopping their own poems. While some of my students had written poetry in previous classes or in their personal lives, many were relatively new to the genre in a formal sense, and some were even new to cultivating good writing habits in general.

In anticipation of this reality, I planned for the course to incorporate activities and discussions that encouraged the kinds of close observation, reflective practice, and mindfulness necessary for good creative writing that might be new to many of my learners.

Additionally, teaching amid an ongoing pandemic, I planned to incorporate mindfulness techniques to help support my students’ mental health. It was from this context that this writing exercise was born.

The Assignment

The writing exercise has three primary goals at its core:

1. For learners to practice the kind of daily observation and reflection necessary for ideating or “chewing” on ideas for poems.
2. For learners to practice mindfulness and support their mental health by grounding themselves in the present during a particularly hectic time in the semester.
3. For learners to practice self-care by tackling some task or chore that has been nagging at them and would improve their lives—even if slightly.

I chose these goals for the writing exercise because I wanted to create a scaffolded experience for my learners that mimicked my own experiences as a writer and academic. I think many of us, as seasoned academics and writers, practice this kind of prewriting that occurs “off the page” as we live our lives. We might ruminate on an idea that comes up in a casual conversation between classes, make an observation while waiting in line at Starbucks, or even play around with different ways to word a concept while we do the dishes. It may start as just happenstance—of course we think about the things we’re interested in during the liminal spaces in our daily schedules—but this informal ideation is actually a complex and valuable skill that helps us work through ideas and explore avenues for when we eventually, formally, approach the page. However, like other complex skills we teach, we can break this up and scaffold our students’ mastery of it.

You can find the full activity directions embedded below, but, broadly, students do the following:

1. Choose a task that needs to be done in your lived space that will take less than 90 minutes to do.
2. Before the task, free write for 5-10 minutes about the task itself and your experiences with it in the past (the full activity includes some questions to help structure this freewriting).
3. Make a short list of words related to the task, paying attention to the texture and sounds of the words.
4. Do the task, focusing on grounding yourself in the present and paying attention to your five senses.
5. After completing the task, free write for another 5-10 minutes, reflecting on this particular instance of the task.
6. Revisit your list of words, adding any new ones that occurred to you as you “lived” in the task for a bit.

Something emphasized in both the leadup to the activity and in the instructions for the exercise is that the objective is not to write the poem but to write toward the poem. In this exercise, we’re focused on ideation and what’s possible, paying attention to what stands out and what’s worth incorporating into our art.

Adapting this Activity

Though this activity started in a poetry class, it can be adapted to other disciplines and other contexts. For example, I’ve repurposed it for my first-year composition courses where learners use this exercise to brainstorm essay topics. Regardless of the discipline, time away from the page to ideate and a moment of grounded mindfulness are valuable.

How might you adapt this activity for your discipline or classes? What opportunities are there for encouraging mindfulness in your learners?