Mandala project as a new approach to primary school pupils’ inappropriate behaviours. Evidence from a preliminary study
Daniela Cappelletto, Andrea Peru
The Mandala project has been conceived with the aim to improve sustained attention and decrease inappropriate behaviours in primary school pupils. Inspired by the Buddhist practices of mindfulness and meditation, Mandala experience consists of 4 steps (i.e. «movements»): relaxation, production, contemplation and transformation, which have been carried out throughout five months in two classes of a primary school. Before and after the Mandala experience, pupils have been administered a linguistically and culturally adapted version of The Belonging Scale to assess the sense of belonging to and ownership of their school. Analogously, both their parents and teachers have been presented with the Italian version the Conner’s Scale to assess pupils’ frequency of inappropriate behaviours. Results were straightforward. On one side, as to pupils’ sense of belonging, we failed to observe any significant difference between pre- and post-experience scores. In other words, the sense of sense of belonging to and ownership of their school did not change throughout Mandala experience. In contrast, both parents and teachers reported a significant decrease of children’s inappropriate behaviours. Although in need of further validation, these findings suggest that Mandala has potential to boost positive changes in primary school pupils.
Keywords
Mandala experience, inappropriate behaviours, sustained attention, questionnaires.