Mindfulness Meditation for Future Early Childhood Teachers in Japan

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Published: 
July, 2017

Source: Teaching and Teacher Education 65 (2017) 136-144

(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

The authors designed a lab-based pilot and classroom-based feasibility study to examine an effective way to introduce mindfulness meditation.

Methodology
The authors designed two key aspects of the study: the feasibility and acceptability of two types of guided meditation and the outcome measures.
They designed a pilot study as a quasi-experimental two-group trial study with repeated measures. They evaluated feasibility and outcomes of meditation for female Japanese university students at the Division of Cerebral Integration in the National Institute for Physiological Sciences.
They developed two types of pre-recorded audio stimuli were developed – one for guided sitting meditation and the other for compassion (i.e., love kindness) meditation.
The authors also implemented a classroom-based comparative feasibility trial.
The authors compared between meditation types (sitting meditation vs. compassion meditation) and 2 meditation statuses (pre-vs. post meditation).

The participants were Japanese female university students who majored in early childhood education.

Findings
The authors found that the first pilot study showed that the protocol is feasible and acceptable, providing the basis for a larger feasibility study.
The student feedback suggested that compassion meditation was more comfortable than the sitting meditation.
The findings from the second pilot study indicate that the two types of meditation similarly reduced stress response, decreased empathy towards people with disability with no significant effect on compassionate love.

The authors also found that although students in both meditation groups reported physical discomfort, only the students in the sitting meditation group reported that they had felt unwell and made more comments and suggestions for changes in the meditation practice.
The authors conclude that the findings of these two studies of the guided mindfulness meditation — one a pilot and the other comparative trial — suggest that mindfulness meditation is feasible to introduce to early childhood education students with some modifications. 

Updated: Oct. 21, 2018
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