I’m excited about how much yoga is cropping up in academic settings.  On Monday I had the opportunity to present some material for a college class at Lesley University.  I did some Masters degree work at Lesley awhile back, and still have a few great connections with some of the other grad students who are there and studying yoga academically. 

 

The format of this class is exactly what I’ve always wanted a class to be:  1 hour of physical yoga practice followed by 1.5 hours of academic class.  Students sat on the floor (not at desks slumped over) and I tried to tie in the physical yoga practice to the topic we were talking about afterwards (the yamas and niyamas – perhaps more on that in a later post!). 

 

My advisor when I was at Lesley has been spending time looking at how yoga is being incorporated into K-12 classrooms as well.  Though I don’t do that kind of work, I’m so excited to think that perhaps yoga can help us in our search for a new paradigm for our education system. 

 

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of controversy about bringing yoga into public schools.  In the last 15 years, several opponents to yoga in the classroom have cited the separation of church and state in the schools, claiming that yoga is too linked to religious practice to be considered secular.   Check out this recent article about a school system in New York state that is struggling with this issue. 

 

Though yoga definitely comes out of spiritual roots, it is so clear (to me) that we have really removed the “religion” from the physical practice we engage in today.   In this classroom (admittedly, at a private university, not a public grade school), it just seemed so obvious to me how some yoga mindfulness fit in to the learning environment.  

 

It makes me sort of interested to teach kids in school and see what that’s like!

 

I’m curious if any of you teach in schools, or have kids who are learning yoga in school?  Share your experiences in this expanding field!