Teaching Mindfulness to Undergraduates: A Survey and Photovoice Study:

How do emerging adults experience mindfulness and compassion? The goals of this study were to (1) evaluate the effectiveness of a mindfulness curricular intervention and (2) examine how students interpreted their experience. We delivered a mindfulness curriculum to 24 college students who meditated twice a week for 7 weeks. Students completed a survey at the beginning and end of the course where they self-reported information about their mental health, compassion, and creativity. Results showed that, over the course of the semester, students demonstrated improvements in measures of creativity, self-compassion, compassion toward others, mental health, and emotional regulation. To gain a more nuanced understanding of students’ interpretations of and experiences with the course material, we used interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to analyze student photovoice projects (wherein they collected and analyzed images to represent mindfulness concepts). Findings illustrate how students typically understoo...