Meditation and Literature Workshop (TAMELIT): the application of a mindfulness program to university education

Abstract

This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of the Meditation and Literature Workshop educational program (known by its Catalan acronym, TAMELIT). It is based on mindfulness and on yoga and advaita meditation, which are applied to the reading and interpretation of literary texts. The wandering of the mind while reading is the problem for which we propose a meditation-based solution. We start from the premise that the development of attention favors the reading and understanding of a text, and the possibility of its inner re-creation. We offered this program as an activity of the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics of the University of Barcelona between 2018 and 2019. Although the results do not show statistically significant changes in the overall level of mindfulness, the qualitative analysis does indeed reveal an improvement in mindfulness abilities. The findings are discussed and it is proposed that the intervention and evaluation protocols should be standardized to allow replication of the research and to broaden the scope of mindfulness interventions in the field of university education.

Keywords: Mindfulness, literature, university education, meditation, awareness, reading comprehension.