A Mindfulness Approach to Educating Preservice School Counselors about Spirituality

Despite the growing demand to address the spiritual issues of K-12 students, many school counsellor preparation programs fail to provide adequate education in this domain. A mindfulness approach is proposed as a largely non-threatening and non-controversial way to introduce spirituality-related topics to preservice public school counsellors and to elementary and secondary students. After defining spirituality within a constructivist framework, the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of mindfulness as well as various programmatic (e.g., curricular and supervisorial changes) and practice-based (e.g., counselling interventions and techniques) recommendations for incorporating spirituality into the preservice counsellor education are presented.