Kenna Knight-Schoeler

How are modes of conscious experience intentionally taught? While consciousness research has extensively investigated meditation, hypnosis, psychedelics, and contemplative practice, comparatively little attention has been devoted to the pedagogical processes through which communities cultivate, scaffold, and refine particular ways of attending to, interpreting, and communicating subjective experience. This paper introduces consciousness pedagogy, defined as the structured transmission of practices, interpretive frameworks, and attentional skills through which communities cultivate particular modes of subjective awareness. Drawing on theories of situated learning and communities of practice, it proposes that such learning occurs not simply through instruction, but through participation in shared cultural practices that shape perception, interpretation, and identity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at Arthur Findlay College, an international center for the study of Spiritualism and mediumship, this research examines how novice practitioners participate in a community dedicated to cultivating mediumistic awareness. Participant observation, reflexive field notes, and semi-structured interviews are analyzed through the complementary lenses of ethnography and Fillmore's theory of frame semantics to investigate how language, instructional practice, and social interaction shape participants' evolving interpretive frameworks. Rather than evaluating the ontological status of mediumistic claims, this study adopts a phenomenological and methodologically agnostic approach, asking how instructors direct attention, scaffold perception, provide feedback, and transmit culturally shared frames through which subtle sensory, emotional, and imaginal experiences are interpreted. The analysis explores a recursive learning process in which semantic framing directs attention, attention influences subjective experience, experience is interpreted through community feedback, and those interpretations become increasingly stabilized through continued participation. By integrating instructional design, situated learning theory, cognitive linguistics, and ethnography, this paper proposes consciousness pedagogy as a framework for investigating how communities intentionally cultivate particular modes of awareness. Although Arthur Findlay College serves as the ethnographic case study, the framework is intended to inform broader investigations of contemplative, therapeutic, and religious traditions in which subjective experience is systematically developed through instruction, practice, and social participation. This interdisciplinary perspective contributes to ongoing discussions concerning the trainability of attention, the relationship between language and conscious experience, and the role of culture in shaping lived consciousness.

Kenna Knight-Schoeler is an independent researcher with a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.S. in Instructional Design & Learning Technology from the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Her research explores consciousness, language, learning, and ethnography, with a focus on how communities cultivate lived experience through shared practices.