This conceptual paper, however, argues that the acceptance and understanding of mindfulness practice within education, does not depend only on evidence of its effectiveness. There is evidence of the growth in implementations and research of mindfulness practice in education, and of the practice's effects on various aspects of students' and teachers' lives. Furthermore, its two patterns reflect a split discourse that is challenged by the practice's psychological-secular framing and its Buddhist framing. Overall, in the studied period mindfulness has been moving from near-anonymity toward the mainstream however, this discourse reflects a nascent phase given that it is only beginning to critique itself. b) Mindfulness as education, which is a more transformative strand characterized by contemplative pedagogy in higher education and sporadic whole-school implementations. It maps this complexity and outlines two main patterns that reflects this discourse to date: a) Mindfulness in education, which comprises mostly of outsourced, secularized interventions aimed at improved mental-physical health, social-emotional learning and cognitive functions. The research reveals an exponential rise in the amount of publications over years, with a complex discourse that evolves from seven different framings of the practice, applied to nine different educational domains and through various types of implementation. This paper offers a first-of-its-kind map of mindfulness in education based on the 447 peer-reviewed papers published between 20 that constitute this academic discourse, applying grounded theory methodology. To date no overarching review has provided an empirically-based mapping of this multifaceted and rapidly developing discourse. They reflect a variety of framings, modalities and educational aims, as documented in hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. These implementations, however, hardly constitute a uniform phenomenon. Since the turn of the millennium there has been a clear rise in the implementation and research of mindfulness across primary, secondary and postsecondary education. Finally, we discuss potential directions for future research on mindfulness-based SEL programs. Furthermore, we report findings from research examining students’ and teachers’ descriptions of their experiences with MindUP as a way in which to further understand the program’s effectiveness from the perspectives of the consumers. To illustrate our perspective on implementation science and mindfulness programs in education, we provide an overview of several studies conducted on MindUP. We emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary research in evaluating mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) for students and teachers alike, research that utilizes a mixed-method designs and that examines multiple outcomes from multiple observers (e.g., self-reports, teacher reports, peer reports). We suggest that the transitional years of pre- and early adolescence (i.e., nine to twelve year olds) may be a particularly effective time to introduce mindfulness practices to young people. We discuss how mindfulness practices and SEL activities may be synergistic, potentially bolstering the efficacy of each, and describe the iterative process of developing, implementing, and evaluating a program that includes both elements. In this chapter we describe the MindUP program: A universal, mindfulness-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program designed to be implemented in schools by regular classroom teachers.
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