Cultivating researcher self-reflexivity and voice using mindful inquiry in intercultural education

Abstract

Mindful Inquiry (MI) has been my choice of intercultural education approach for working with graduate students because it is particularly suitable for attempts to capture the dynamic, developmental, and complex nature of communicating with people of diverse cultures. MI is a learner-centered approach to pursuing research that is personally meaningful as well as intellectually rigorous. MI is the answer to my pedagogical research question of how to help students to cultivate their self-reflexivity and voice as researchers. Two case studies of students using the MI approach will be described and discussed. Both students are studying international relations in a Japanese university and made excellent use of the opportunities afforded in this class to become more self-aware of how they were communicating across cultures and their standpoint and voice as researchers. These two cases were selected because they were both interesting in themselves and representative of the types of questions the other students posed. They also provide various contrasts of cultural and educational background, gender, identity, and emphasis. Two gratifying characteristics of student MI work, rigorous personal engagement and high quality products, have encouraged me to continue developing this type of pedagogy in my classes. This article is devoted to detailing two actual MIs to illustrate how this approach can be put into practice with valuable results. The courage and honesty students displayed in the self-examinations they undertook as part of their MIs were impressive. Working with them during the semester as they were pursuing an MI increased my appreciation for its power as a learner-centered approach to the bodymindful development of the knowledge, motivation, and skills competency factors that promote appropriate, effective, and satisfying intercultural communication. Bodymindfulness is a term I coined for the process of attending to all aspects of the bodymind— body, emotion/feeling, mind, and spirit—in order to grasp the holistic personal meaning of an internal event and to use the resultant understanding to communicate skillfully. MIs are ideal for developing self-reflexive intercultural researchers who are able to see and to give voice to themselves as intellectuals who are functioning in a particular context while carrying specific biases and identifications.

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