This website serves as a repository of OER (Open Educational Resources) materials for scholars and students, near and far, engaged in contemplative studies and education. It was developed as a result of a grant from the SFU Library and Open Campus BC. Built around the site are our aspirations to develop a community of contemplative education scholars—students and faculty—a network that promotes local and international efforts in contemplative inquiry in education. This is an example of SFU’s intentions to be the ‘engaged university’ which reaches out to and connects with others and the world.
Locally, this website supports and serves the M.Ed. Contemplative Inquiry and Approaches in Education program in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University (SFU). In reaching out beyond our local environs, we hope the site will serve in providing a place of connection and a place where resources can be accessed. Again, all resources here are either “Open Access” or “Creative Commons.” We hope they can serve the further development of scholarship in the field of contemplative inquiry.
The content of this website consists of Open Educational Resources pertaining to contemplation, contemplative inquiry, and contemplative inquiry in education. OER are defined by UNESCO in 2002 as “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license” and can “range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation.” It also includes relevant pre-publication versions (“pre-pubs”) of journal articles or book chapters by our scholarly associates in contemplative education here at SFU and elsewhere.
The resources contained on and linked from this site have been made openly available by their authors, usually under a Creative Commons license. See individual publications, course resources, and student works for license details. This page and other site texts are openly licensed under a [e.g., Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)] license.
The SFU library has been instrumental in developing OER grants to allow faculty to re-design courses and include or adopt OER as curricular material. We are taking this opportunity to develop a living repository of OER for our students, faculty, and colleagues from the larger reaches of our global contemplative community.
The site includes document files, web pages, and other materials that all exist as:
Creative Commons 
Open Access 
Note that there are several different Creative Commons licenses, granting different permissions. Be aware, when accessing resources that are deemed Creative Commons, what kind of license is granted.
We would like to express our appreciation to all the SFU library staff who have been so supportive of our efforts, especially Hope Power, who unfailingly answered questions, helped with finding resources, and continually provided good cheer and inspiration. We also express our appreciation to Kristina Berynets and Scott Bowering for their tireless and creative efforts in site design and content building. Lastly, many thanks go to Quincy Wang, Website Coordinator in Instructional and IT Support in the Faculty of Education who helped us get started in developing the site and shared her considerable expertise along the way.
May this website serve to promote the contemplative ways of being and doing in these challenging times!
Yours contemplatively,
Charles Scott and Heesoon Bai (Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University)
