“In most cases, these students are teaching a foreign language course for the very first time,” Scida said, “so there is always a lot of stress and anxiety in relation to teaching for the very first time in this new context.” Scida decided to incorporate mindfulness practices into a pedagogy course that she offers in the first semester of the Ph.D. “Over the years, I have become more and more concerned about my students’ levels of stress, and I know that this kind of stress can have a significant impact on the teacher training experience and on teacher performance and job satisfaction in a field where burnout is a very real threat.” She intuited that these practices could affect teacher retention as well. After taking a couple of courses through the medical school’s Mindfulness Center at UVA a few years ago, Scida recalled, “I was really interested in seeing the impact that contemplative practices in the course might have, including the impact they might have on their teaching experience as well as their overall health and wellbeing.”

Yet while she found extensive research on the effects of incorporating mindfulness practices among the K-12 teacher population, very little attention had been paid to graduate students heading into faculty positions in higher education. program, Emily Scida had seen plenty of stress among her student population. Over the course of her 18 years in the University of Virginia’s Spanish department and particularly in her primary role of training graduate student teachers in the Ph.D.

Emily scida actfl