Frontiers in Education
March 17, 2022
Kevin Rebecchi, Hélène Hagège
12 citations
A theoretical review examines the links between altered states of consciousness and creativity, focusing on a spectrum of attentional states including hypnagogia, mind wandering, mindfulness, and flow. These states occur during activities like sports, music, painting, writing, video games, theater, meditation, and boredom, as well as in professional fields such as education. The authors argue that researchers often isolate single states (e.g., mind wandering) without considering their relationships with others or with intention, levels of consciousness, and changes in perception of time, self, and space.
Frontiers in Education
May 29, 2026
Thorsten Scheiner, Dan Jazby, Edmund Aspbury-Miyanishi
Teacher noticing—how teachers perceive and respond to classroom events—is often explained by cognitivist models that treat it as a mental operation separate from the body and environment. This paper proposes an alternative model grounded in embodied, ecological, and enactive perspectives, arguing that noticing is an embodied, situated practice. Teachers attune to classroom affordances through bodily exploration, actualize those affordances through action, and cultivate them through ongoing engagement. The model unifies these three traditions as complementary analytic lenses for describing a single phenomenon: professional responsiveness to the classroom. It rejects mind–body and teacher–environment dichotomies, reconceptualizing noticing as an emergent, lived practice within complex classroom ecologies, and offers a research agenda for studying it in real teaching contexts.
Frontiers in Education
February 13, 2026
Jiraporn Chano, Bahtiar Mohamad, Surachet Noirid et al.
A systematic mapping of mindfulness research in educational workplaces from 2020 to 2024 analyzed 242 peer-reviewed publications using bibliometric and conceptual methods. Four thematic clusters emerged: Teacher Well-being and Mental Health, Mindfulness Interventions and Training, Student Development and Educational Psychology, and Socio-Cultural and Methodological Context. Individual-level constructs like stress and burnout dominate the literature, while systemic factors such as school leadership and collective efficacy are significantly underrepresented. The keyword patterns are consistent with the 'McMindfulness' critique, suggesting an empirical tendency toward individualized conceptualizations, though this does not directly test the critique. The authors propose a multi-level conceptual framework and research agenda to integrate organizational applications.
Frontiers in Education
October 10, 2025
Sāgaradevī Barratt
Contemplative education in higher education has expanded beyond mindfulness interventions aimed at student wellbeing and academic outcomes. Educators with autonomy in teaching design have diversified contemplative practices, but a theoretical framework is needed to build a robust evidence base. While links to social and emotional learning and transformative learning theory exist, they do not capture the depth of learning possible. This paper uses the lens of enaction, drawing on relevance realisation and wisdom, to present a conceptual model explaining how contemplative practices may take effect. The model aims to support future research and pedagogical integration by showing how contemplation can foster wisdom, offering fresh theoretical insights for higher education.