“After more than thirty years in education, I conclude that the best way to make our educational institutions attractive and successful is to empower their leaders through mindfulness,” says Dr Elizabeth Nakayiza in her book Mindfulness for Educational Leadership in the 21st Century.
After relating it to meditation and contemplation, Nakayiza describes mindfulness as the maintenance of a moment-by-moment awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, movements, actions and surrounding environment, whatever or wherever they may be, and doing so without judgment.
For 75 pages, Nakayiza tries to build a case for mindfulness in Uganda’s education system, especially its leadership. The first two chapters explain the concept of mindfulness and encourage the reader to understand more about the way their emotions are affecting their thoughts and behavior.
Viewed by some as a spiritual philosophy and others as a way of life, mindfulness has been in practice for over 25,000 years, more recently through religious traditions such as Stoicism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
But Nakayiza says it is high time it was brought to our obsolete education system, giving cases of several universities, mostly in the USA, where it has been used to great benefit.
She argues that many educators – particularly classroom teachers – live with such stresses as time stress, role stress, sleep stress, and job-related stresses, worsened by global stresses.
To lessen the impact, she says, mindfulness meditation or contemplation provides coping techniques for relaxation and calmness. She gives different mindful exercises and practices such as mindful listening, mantra-based meditation, sitting meditation, mindful counting, and five-minute breathing space, among others.
Nakayiza attacks Uganda’s education system for being premised on the “downloading system” where teachers and students consume content given to them by curriculum developers without any input.
She argues that excessive reliance on foreign experts has prevented Uganda’s educational institutions and subsequent education reforms from addressing contemporary and local questions and needs regarding students’ careers preparations in the new global panorama.
However, she is persuaded that a mindful leadership can offset these defaults by heightening individuals’ self-cognition, so they can assume personal responsibilities for the needed change such as through sounder decision-making.
She suggests several theories on curriculum review, centred around inputs of parents, teachers and students for they are the consumers and beneficiaries of this curriculum.
She concludes: “Were mindfulness a regular practice in Ugandan education, burnout and tension would be rare for students and teachers, and calmness and relation would become the norm in human interactions.”
Mindfulness for Educational Leadership in the 21st Century is available at bookpoint in Bugolobi at Shs 25,000.