By MARK PEARSON
My keynote address last week to the international research conference at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, introduced strategies for enabling students and colleagues to reflect mindfully in the course of their communication and education.
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The edited shorter address follows. The full version is available from the organisers (udari@spc.cmb.ac.lk ) and will be published in the conference proceedings later this year.
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Thank you for the honour of delivering this keynote address. I thank and acknowledge the conference organisers, chair, university officials, invited dignatories, delegates and students.
I wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land where I have written and delivered this address – the Kombumerri people of the Yugambeh language group of indigenous peoples in Australia – and to their elders past, present and emerging.
I also acknowledge the communication, ethical and legal codes and practices they developed over tens of thousands of years, and to the cultural rules underpinning human communication in all communities internationally, including in Sri Lanka.
This paper introduces some strategies for enabling students and colleagues to reflect mindfully when engaging in their communication and education. In doing so it attempts to lay some foundation stones for proposing such strategies – offering the intellectual narrative of their conception and development.
Over the past decade I have been exploring the possibilities for mindful reflection in journalism – a concept I first raised in my UNESCO World Press Freedom Address in Auckland in 2013. That – and a follow-up article on mindful journalism in an academic journal led to an approach by the pioneer of this field, the late Professor Shelton Gunaratne to join him and our colleague Dr Sugath Senarath in the editing and authorship of the book Mindful Journalism in 2015, where we expounded upon how the various steps of Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path could underpin a more mindful approach to news gathering, selection and reporting. In the nine years since its publication I have attempted to develop strategies for applying mindfulness strategies in journalism, communication and legal education – to help students and colleagues forge solutions to ethical dilemmas that might constitute a genuine ‘middle way’. I thank Dr Senarath and the organising committee for inviting me here today to discuss some of those practical tools for use in the communication and education contexts.
As my new book explains, professional communicators and educators can draw upon a range of reflective tools including variations of mindfulness-based meditation techniques expounded by the Buddha 2500 years ago to help them take a considered and purposive approach to ethical and legal decision-making.
Buddhism does not have an historical monopoly on the art of reflection. Socrates described self-examination as central to a virtuous life. The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) summed up the practice we now know as ‘metacognition’ (Tarricone, 2011) – being consciously aware of one’s own thinking and doing.
This is similar to the secular approach developed three centuries later by educationalist Donald Schön, whose research aimed to equip professionals with the ability to make crucial decisions in the midst of practice, which he called ‘reflection-in-action’ .
The application of MBM to morality and by extension to professional ethics echoes the step of ‘Right Conduct’ in the Noble Eightfold Path – samma kammanto – which involves ‘a call to understand one’s behaviour more objectively before trying to improve it’ and ‘to reflect on actions with an eye to the motives that prompted them’ (Smith and Novak, 2003: 43).
Communicators and educators need to ‘reflect-in-action’ upon ethical dilemmas as they arise in the midst of their work (Schön, 1987: 26).
The lack of reflection can lead to unnecessary harm to others. Unethical behaviour can exacerbate the trauma that victims have already encountered in shocking news events. Unlawful practice can bring reputational or financial damage to others and awards of damages or even jail terms for the offending communicators (Pearson, 2024, p.50).
Another crucial reason why it is important to engage in some method of careful reflection before making an ethical or legal decision is the mental health of the communication professionals and educators themselves.
In my recent book I stress the importance of students identifying their own unique ‘moral compass’ – their sense of right and wrong behaviour that can stem from a combination of a host of factors including one’s upbringing, religion, and values along with their professional ethical codes (Pearson, 2024, p.16).
As an exercise, I ask students to sit for a few moments to reflect upon influences upon their own moral decision-making and then draw their unique moral compasses, attributing the four main points on the compass to the four prime influences on their moral decisions, with the lesser points representing other factors.
I suggest this is a worthwhile exercise for all of us – teachers, students and practitioners.
Interconnections between MBM and mental health
Psychological studies of trauma have uncovered the notion of ‘moral injury’ – where individuals feel they have compromised their moral compasses through their unethical behaviour and blame themselves for the harm that has resulted when the professional expectations of an employee was at odds with that individual’s moral principles.
So students need a toolkit of techniques for inward reflection they can use to assess their thought processes, emotional states, workplace situations, learning and, most importantly, their ethical and legal decision-making (Pearson, 2024, p. 60).
The answer to pausing to identify the ‘red flags’ that might represent an ethical or legal dilemma lies in a developing a routine system of reflection. These might be situations or emotions, identifiable via mindful reflection.
Obviously, the key here is being able to identify a problematic emotion or situation, red flag it, then pause to weigh an appropriate ethical and legal course of action.
The approach calls upon students and communicators to pause to adopt the elements of the Eightfold Path into these eight steps of mindful reflection:
| Stage of reflection | Explanation |
| How might I improve this communication to minimise risk? [Wise Speech – Samma vaca ] | Reconsider your words in any communication you are undertaking and refine and edit them to conform with legal requirements. |
We put this into practice in the classroom in a pilot research project (Pearson, 2023) where mindfulness-based reflections were offered regularly during a media law course, with a strong emphasis upon emotional and situational analysis of media law dilemmas .
There were a variety of responses from 90 students to the mindfulness reflection experience. Some saw it as invaluable for their learning, lives and careers.
They said they were “reviewing in more depth”, “raising a mental flag on sections which were still unclear”, giving “a moment to understand the course better”, “consolidate learning”, helping “info to sink in”, and “consolidating the information” (Pearson, 2023).
Numerous respondents highlighted the mental health benefits of the practice.
Some students commented on the pause to reflect function and its benefits:
It made me realise that many times before making a decision or judgement, did I not stop to think or consider my actions.
Another said it trained them to “step back and assess an area, or myself, before venturing into a position, or stance or opinion”. This was metacognition in evidence (Flavell 1976; Tarricone 2011) – thinking about their own thinking – and ‘reflection-in-action’ actually happening (Schön 1987).
Such accounts offer encouragement to those incorporating pause and reflect exercises in their textbooks (Baker 2020; Pearson 2024). They give hope that some instruction in this might assist students to actually execute those strategies when encountering occupational dilemmas after graduation.
In this summary of my full paper – available from the organisers – we have journeyed through definitions of mindfulness in its modern educational context having established its roots in Buddhism and philosophy. We have learned how we might map our own moral compasses. We have looked at the relationship between MBM and mental health, and its potential for offering resilience to post-traumatic stress for journalists reporting tragic and gruesome stories. We have outlined MBM as a tool for ethical decision making. And we have reviewed a recent pilot project where students reported the pros and cons of engaging in MBM in the media law curriculum. Much is still to be explored in the application of this two millennia-old practice to tertiary education and communication and educational practice. I hope some of you are interested enough to undertake research to shed further light on this enlightening path with so many potential benefits.
References
Baker, S (2020) ‘The Ethics of Advocacy: Moral Reasoning in the Practice of Public Relations’, in Wilkins L and Christians CG (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics, 2nd edition, Taylor and Francis, NY. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315545929
Bhikkhu, T. 2018, ‘The Buddha’s original teachings on mindfulness’, Tricycle – The Buddhist Review, 5 March, <https://tricycle.org/article/satipatthana-sutta-mindfulness/>.
Blum, L. 2022, ‘Iris Murdoch’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2022 Edition, Zalta, E.N. and Nodelman, U. eds, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/murdoch/>.
Bok, S. 1978, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, Pantheon Books, New York.
Drumwright, M. and Murphy, P. 2013, ‘How advertising practitioners view ethics: Moral muteness, moral myopia, and moral imagination’, Journal of Advertising, 33 (2), 7– 24.
Feinstein, A. and Storm, H. 2017, The Emotional Toll on Journalists Covering The Refugee Crisis, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford.
Germer CK, Siegel RD and Fulton PR (2005) Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, New York: Guilford Press.
Gunaratne, Shelton A., Mark Pearson and Sugath Senarath, (2015). Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era – A Buddhist Approach. Routledge, NY.
Gunaratne, S. A. (2005) The Dao of the press: A humanocentric theory, Cresskill, NJ, Hampton
Gunaratne, S. A. (2007) Let many journalisms bloom: Cosmology, Orientalism and freedom, China Media Research, Vol. 3, No. 4 pp 60-73
Gunaratne, S. A. (2009) A Buddhist view of journalism: Emphasis on mutual causality, Javnost: The Public, Vol. 16, No. 2 pp 61-75
Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. 2009, ‘Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy’, Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003>
Locke, J. 1959, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Dover Publications, NY.
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Pearson, M. (2024). The Communicator’s Guide to Media Law and Ethics – A Handbook for Australian Professionals. Routledge, London and New York.
Pearson, M. (2023). Student perceptions of mindful reflection as a media law teaching tool. Australian Journalism Review. 45 (2) pp. 197–211.
Pearson, M., McMahon, C., O’Donovan, A., & O’Shannessy, D. (2021). Building journalists’ resilience through mindfulness strategies. Journalism, 22(7), 1647-1664. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919833253
Pearson, M., McMahon, C., and O’Donovan, A. (2018) ‘Potential benefits of teaching mindfulness to journalism students’. Asia Pacific Media Educator (December). 28:2: https://doi.org/10.1177/1326365X18800080
Pearson, M. (2014). Towards ‘mindful journalism’: Applying Buddhism’s Eightfold Path as an ethical framework for modern journalism, Ethical Space 11 (4): 38 – 46.
Pearson, M. (May 5, 2013). Press freedom, social media and the citizen. Inaugural NZ UNESCO World Press Freedom Day Lecture 2013. Pacific Media Centre, AUT Auckland. Available: https://journlaw.com/2013/05/05/press-freedom-social-media-and-the-citizen-my-2013-unesco-world-press-freedom-day-lecture/
Riskin, LL and Wohl, RA (2015). ‘Mindfulness in the Heat of Conflict: Taking STOCK’ Harvard Negotiation Law Review, 20. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2754646
Schön, D. 1987, Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning the Professions, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
Shay J. 2014. ‘Moral injury’. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182–191.
Smith, H. and Novak, P. (2003) Buddhism: A concise introduction, New York, Harper San Francisco
Tarricone P (2011) The Taxonomy of Metacognition. Psychology Press, East Sussex.
Trammel RC (2015) ‘Mindfulness as Enhancing Ethical Decision-Making and the Christian Integration of Mindful Practice’, Social Work and Christianity 42(2): 165–177.
Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.
© Mark Pearson 2024 – the moral right of the author has been asserted.
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