Building Just Communities Through Contemplative Teaching and Learning

Rhonda V. Magee Professor of Law

University of San Francisco

Some Themes Guiding Our Work Together.

• Examine positionality and privilege, starting with self.

• Explore contemplative approaches to creating and sustaining just communities.

• Explore ways of nurturing interpersonal connection in the service of social justice and the creation of community.

• Honor lived experience and meaningful difference.

• Explore how we do the work of unsettling oppressions – creating justice – in contemplative community.

• Inspire all our students in this work and orientation.

• Engage traditionally/newly marginalized students.

• Injustice is global.

• We are all in this together.

Some Themes Guiding Our Work Together.

Building Just Communities Requires Attending to Issues of Injustice.

"Black Lives Matter protest" by The All-Nite Images - https://www.flickr.com/photos/otto-yamamoto/15305646874/. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via

Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Lives_Matter_protest.jpg#/media/File:Black_Lives_Matter_protest.jpg. Brown v. Board (web).

Kinston, NC 1972: A girl begins school in a still officially-segregated NC classroom.

Putting a face on “bussing for integration”: Rhonda Magee, Hampton, VA, 1977-1985

In my own work: contemplative approaches to legal education.

Inspired by and working with others….

I explore new ways…

Exploring Contemplative Processes for Resolving Conflict and Promoting

Justice.

Contacting the present

Expanding skill sets

Transforming Processes

Rethinking legal

education

Increasing Justice/ Just Community

It meant opening up the law school classroom….

…and bringing the whole person back in.

Learning about creating just, beloved communities from past social justice movements and new class communities.

Contemplative Legal Education -> Contemplative Law:

Integrating Compassion, Peacemaking and Healing

Developing Lawyers in Three Ways, through Three Windows:

•Intra-personal

•Inter-personal

•Inter-systemic

Real change can happen.

“It [contemplative practice] has helped me to see how interconnected all of life is... I am beginning to view the law profession as one that can heal relationships instead of one that is adversarial.” (R10, 7/27/12)

A Curated Set of Awareness-Based Practices….

that assist us in working with our

experiences, processing our discomfort, and increasing empathy and compassion, all while learning, growing, and working for change

together.

Experimenting, reflecting over time in diverse learning communities, I’ve evolved….. ……ColorInsight Practices

Familiar practices: sitting with awareness, compassion, self-compassion, compassion and lovingkindness practices, mindful communication/insight dialogue practices…

Along with some new: narrative/weaving-our-stories practices, beholding and bearing witness practices, sending and receiving/equanimity practices, restorative justice circles, and more…..

ColorInsight Practices and Just Community Building.

Teaching and learning about common barriers to just communities include, for example, unexamined and unchallenged: • Privileges • Microaggressions • Patterns of disproportionate violence/punishment • Positionality and contextualization • Maldistributions of power and resources

Combined with learning from psychology, sociology and other disciplines aimed at transforming patterns of injustice.

Mindful Criminal Justice Conference September 17-21, Kalamazoo, MI

Leading to work to effective work with others aimed at changing the world….

Shared reflections: In pairs, devoting 5 uninterrupted minutes to each person….. How do the themes of the conference: Resonate? Connect with your work? Challenge you?

with gratitude, and the love that is “what justice looks like in public.”