Abiding Heart Education™
Experiential Buddhist Curriculum

Introduction

The Abiding Heart’s Experiential Buddhist Curriculum for kindergarten, primary (classes 1-8) and high school (classes 9-12) is rich, delightful and transformative at the same time. It is a joy for teachers to teach this curriculum. Teaching becomes an art!

We deeply believe that our Experiential Buddhist Curriculum may help children thrive and progress on the path of inner development and through this process, the people around them - teachers, parents, neighbours and community - can also heal.

Abiding Heart's Experiential Buddhist Curriculum is the product of 26 years of collecting and creating resources, lessons, activities, and literature in 17 different primary school subjects (classes 1-8) and more than 10 other themes for kindergarten. Our Experiential Buddhist Curriculum is rich, wholesome, joyful and nourishing both for teachers and children. It is also a culmination of knowledge and experience of decades of dedicated work by experienced kindergarten and primary school teachers, special needs teachers, teacher trainers, curriculum developers, and other pedagogical specialists, working in many different cultural and socio-economic settings around the world.

Abiding Heart’s Experiential Buddhist Curriculum includes circle time, storytelling, puppet shows, indoor and outdoor play, language learning, physical education and gardening, immersed in Buddhism an in line with best practices in early childhood and primary (classes 1-8) education.

Throughout the schooling years, children learn meditation, reverence and rituals, heritage arts and crafts, paubha (thangka) painting, the sciences, sustainability and environmental studies, humanities, social studies, history, contemplative studies, contemplative movement and charya dance, music (playing musical instruments), singing, woodwork, stone carving and metal work.

Abiding Heart’s Experiential Buddhist Curriculum is also designed to be flexible to meet each country’s curriculum guidelines to ensure that the children’s education prepares them for contributing to when they become adults.

A large percentage of the children from various Asian African and European countries and other communities worldwide are expected to be fluent in more than one language. Abiding Heart’s language curriculum offers a bilingual or trilingual learning environment that celebrates the rich traditions and cultures represented in each school. We provide our trainees with training on how to teach our integrated language-content curriculum and how to balance teaching two or three languages from kindergarten to class 8. Our language curriculum has a strong emphasis on students learning to speak eloquently, read fluently, and write at a sophisticated level, so by the end of class 8 the children are highly proficient and can shift from one language to another with fluency and ease.

Our Experiential Buddhist Curriculum implemented in Benchen School, Pharpin Nepal

Abiding Heart’s Experiential Buddhist Education is in that it is based on a Buddhist contemplative and experiential tradition rather than on prevailing education systems. It places the emphasis on developing wisdom and compassion both in the classroom and in our personal life. Abiding Heart Education™ fuses the Buddhist worldview, meditation and application with Waldorf-inspired education and developmental science to create our cutting edge children’s transformational pedagogy. We conduct action research which informs the development of our curriculum and methodology as well as the children’s curricular content and learning style. This transformational approach to learning is grounded in a process that nurtures the learners’ changing consciousness and fosters autonomy and ownership in teachers. Our curriculum interlinks all aspects of learning and knowing and advocates for self transformation by creating a shift in how children learn and experience the world.

The methodology of delivering our Experiential Buddhist curriculum is based on our fusion of various learning and teaching approaches: Buddhist and contemporary contemplative traditions, the Waldorf education framework and our transformational and experiential approach to education. Abiding Heart’s Curriculum rests on a contemplative worldview that is inspired by experiential Buddhist wisdom with meditation and application in everyday experience. Abiding Heart’s curriculum is delivered via twelve to fifteen main lesson (thematic) blocks from Year 1 to 8, one of which is the production of a class play. All subjects are immersed in the Buddhist view: literacy, numeracy, creative writing, literature and poetry, contemplative studies and literature, visual arts, performing arts, history, the sciences, humanities, social studies, handwork, crafts, heritage learning, sustainability and environmental studies, horticulture science, home economics, and life skills and self care. Music, arts and movement are interwoven into the subject areas.

Abiding Heart's Experiential Buddhist teacher training courses prepares trainees with the necessary skills, knowledge and understanding of transformative experiential contemplative kindergarten and primary education. They also provide training in caring for and supporting children’s wellbeing. It is impossible to implement the Abiding Heart's Experiential Buddhist Curriculum without attending our two-year full time teacher training courses.

The teacher training courses interweave academic lectures, practical curriculum studies, heritage and experiential art classes, and meditation, all of which are necessary skills required for teachers to teach our curriculum. These courses include a detailed training on how to teach the rich material and resources of Abiding Heart's Experiential Buddhist Curriculum. The Abiding Heart's curriculum content is enormous! We have a very large amount of content and resources. The content of our Experiential Buddhist Curriculum is a fusion of experiential Buddhism processed through the Abiding Heart learning methodology. It draws deeply on the live Buddhist experiential tradition which emphasises applying the knowledge acquired to everyday life in order to nurture an ongoing transformation. This new education approach brings transformational learning into the everyday reality of kindergarten and primary children.