Publications.

Dissertation · 2017 · UCLA

A Case Study of a Yoga and Meditation Intervention in an Urban School.

A Complex Web of Relationships and Resilience in the Search for Student Well-Being.

Sará King · Doctor of Philosophy in Education · UCLA · 2017 · Co-Chairs: Thomas M. Philip & Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

This is where the work began for me — the ground the Science of Social Justice grew up out of. A close, careful look at nine students of color in an urban, low-SES school participating in a classroom-based yoga, meditation, and mindfulness intervention called For Youth (FY) — and at the relationships that held the intervention up.

The dissertation argues something I have not stopped thinking about since: you cannot disentangle the impact of contemplative practices from the human relationships that carry them into a room. What students were healed by was never only the practice. It was the practice and the people, woven together. The findings ask researchers and educators to take that seriously — to redefine well-being for marginalized students, to ask what emotional resilience actually requires, and to build interventions that honor both.

“Researchers cannot disentangle the impact of the relationships that students have with the adult stakeholders who implement these interventions, from the effect of the practices of yoga, meditation and/or mindfulness themselves.”

— From the abstract

Committee: Megan Loef Franke · Howard S. Adelman · Tyrone C. Howard · Thomas M. Philip (Co-Chair) · Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (Co-Chair)

Read on UCLA eScholarship → Download the PDF

See how this becomes the Science of Social Justice →