Teachers Meaning-Making Process of Yoga as an Embodied Self-Regulation Tool in High School Environments: The High School Yoga Mat Study

In yoga-research applied to education, yoga is viewed as an embodied self-regulation (ESR) tool to benefit students and teachers thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiology. Yoga is being widely implemented into schools to facilitate academic and non-academic growth and development. Teachers are essential in providing yoga as an ESR tools to students and supporting ESR development. To understand yoga as a tool for teaching and learning ESR, this research explores three areas: (1) initial phase of introducing and educating teachers about school-based, yoga program implementation; (2) the complexities of teachers meaning-making (M-M) and learning process in understanding yoga as a tool; and (3) how the researcher can best support teachers M-M process toward yoga as an ESR tool in the school environment. Using a single-site, multiple case research design and systems thinking approach, this study explored five high school (HS) teachers M-M process of yoga as an ESR tool in the HS environment. This research has implications for and inform research in the following ways: (a) teachers unawareness or misunderstanding of yoga as an effective tool for ESR, (b) development, and life-long learning, (c) innovative teacher preparation to effectively utilize yoga as an ESR tool in the HS environment, and (d) improve procedures for applied yoga research. Future research should focus on developing a process-oriented framework that describes how the researcher can support teachers M-M to improve collaborative efforts between teachers and researchers. Main findings and conclusions will be presented