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Mindfulness practices are increasingly used in classrooms to enhance the well-being dimensions of learning environments. New Zealand policy documents draw on a bicultural perspective that promotes a holistic framing of well-being. This paper will consider the transformative possibilities of a mindfulness-based breathing intervention in two New Zealand classrooms of students aged between 10 and 12 years old. Operational definitions of mindfulness include awareness of emotional, cognitive, and physical experiences rather than a focus on a state of mind. Using authentic inquiry, we draw on multi-theoretical and multi-methodological perspectives to explore observing/noticing/attending to sensations/perceptions/thoughts/feelings associated with a classroom mindfulness intervention. Specifically, we examine students' increased awareness and evolving understandings of mind | body connections that emerged during cogenerative dialoguing. We found that students puzzled over whether it is possible to separate physical, mental and emotional states. We consider the implications of the mindfulness-breathing intervention in generating participants' insights into well-being and wellness.

Bringing an awareness of emotions to the fore through mindfulness-based breathing and providing a space to discuss them is a way of promoting teacher and student agency in collectively developing structures specific to their learning environment. The authors explore students', teachers', and researchers' collective sensemaking through cogenerative dialoguing (cogen) about a mindfulness-based breathing practice at the start of mathematics lessons in an elementary classroom. They found that the power of cogen as hybridized space enabled the generation of collective understanding and the potential for all cogen participants to become engaged in an authentic and transformative way in discussing classroom life. The authors argue that the mindfulness-based breathing practice itself acted as a heuristic for thinking about learning environments and, during the reflexive process of thinking about the breathing practice, new forms of classroom culture unfolded both expanding classroom structures and the practice itself, and laying bare otherwise taken-for-granted practices.