Yoga in Schools: Self-Care for Administrators and Teachers

Abstract

Since early 20th century, yoga is applied as a therapeutic intervention to provide various psychophysiological benefits. It has been positioned as an effective tool to combat compassion fatigue of professionals. School based yoga is usually integrated in Physical Education curriculum or department. Yoga’s development in China has become the prevalent fitness choice founded by imported knowledge and traditional interpretation of body technique. School administrators can equally have emotional concerns, similar internal struggles and external conflicts with others but minimal literature on self-care is studied about them. The purpose of this study was to assess the yoga in schools and examine the self-care of administrators and supervisors. This study was anchored on Mindful-Based Supervision Framework by Haberlin (2020) which involves Mindful walking, Deep listening, Mindful notetaking, and Meditation. The latter was the focus of the study that uses yoga to achieve self-care among school administrators in China. The study involved mostly male respondents between 31-36 years old with permanent employment as teachers who served as administrators or supervisors for one year. Using quantitative descriptive correlational design, respondents agreed in all attributes in yoga in school such as objectives, content, and impact and occasionally practiced all attributes of self-care in terms of physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, and balanced self-care practices. To strengthen and intensify the yoga program for teachers and school administrators, self-care strategies were recommended to be integrated as the output of the study.