By Sheeva Azma
Many people in academia teach, but how many of those people actually have a dedicated method and practice for teaching – in other words, pedagogy? If you asked me what my pedagogy is, I would say that it mostly involves making the learning process as simple as possible, with the least amount of barriers. Barriers can include the student's own beliefs, my level of confidence in the subject I am teaching, and external things like how we are feeling on a given day or what things are happening in the world that have captured the public consciousness. (Isn't it amazing that none of those things directly relate to what is being taught itself?)
Sometimes, life readily lends itself to teachable moments, but everything about teaching feels a lot more uncertain to me now that I am on the teaching side and not the student side in the education world. I am a tutor and substitute teacher in addition to running Fancy Comma, as of writing this blog. My challenge for this school semester is to shy away from my safe space as a K-12 (and sometimes college) English and writing tutor/teacher and get back into tutoring/subbing STEM subjects that I find "too hard" given all of the non-curriculum-related variables that can make tutoring/teaching life interesting.
The hardest part of teaching, for me, is not about the content
I am learning that those non-educational things are really the big things when it comes to teaching. My current preoccupations as an educator are trying to figure out classroom management and being better able to relate to students. None of that involves the actual curriculum at all!
That's why I wanted to read A Pedagogy of Kindness, history professor Catherine Denial's book, and see what I could learn about the value of kindness in teaching. I have often considered being relatable and friendly as my secret superpower in teaching...and indeed, Denial writes, a "kindness practice" (more on that later on in this blog post) goes a long way in teaching!
The two most important things to me, as an educator, are to 1) always meet the learner's curiosity with knowledge and 2) to have fun in the process. My approach wasn't always this way, but it's what works for me! Incorporating kindness as the bedrock of my teaching endeavors might just be what I need this semester to make teaching more fun and less anxiety-provoking. It's a perfect strategy as I have been slowly learning about what types of environments are best for future life success for young people. From my casual reading on this subject, stress does not help, but positive social experiences do. Perhaps Denial is onto way more than she knows?
It's yet another thing I do now. Photo by Pixabay on
Pexels.com Kindness in teaching is not niceness, but a self-care practice extended to oneself and others
I've never taken a course on teaching, but apparently my approach as an intermittent educator over the past 20 years isn't too far off from what actual teaching is supposed to look like. Developing an effective pedagogy takes trial-and-error – and kindness – argues Denial in A Pedagogy of Kindness. Kindness allows you to better relate to your students, and it also makes the learning environment much better, but it is a difficult practice. The end result of a kindness pedagogy is teaching that is easily accessed, rewarding, and, of course, kind. Importantly, kindness is not the same as niceness: "Real kindness is not about individual pleasantries or letting injustices pass," she says. Kindness is about realness, honesty, and "demanding integrity."
Three things changed her pedagogical approach to one of kindness. Those three things were being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), participating in a program to improve K-12 history teaching, and a four-day workshop on Intergroup Dialogue, which focused on using communication to understand oppression. Over several years, she began to sit with her discomfort, which she had previously ignored, and in doing so, learned to develop a practice of kindness for herself which she passed on to her students.
What is a "kindness pedagogy"?
So what exactly is a pedagogy of kindness? As she writes in the book, it involves both believing and believing in students – seeing them as collaborators in the learning process. This type of mindset lends itself to some pretty novel approaches in academia, such as something called "ungrading" in which learning is not measured through grades and students are not forced to complete assignments just to check boxes, but are challenged to do things beyond writing an essay. Communicating in different formats allows students to learn more effectively, Denial says.
A pedagogy of kindness treats students as equal in the learning journey, and acknowledges that the student's learning environment is the teacher's work environment – so why not make it the best environment possible?
I was surprised to read that a lot of her teaching experiments that educators might find unconventional actually worked. She utilized an "unessay" approach in which students were required to write a rap, poem, dance, or 'zine. In some of her experiments, Denial even asks her students to come up with the course syllabus.
If you are looking for ways to incorporate kindness into your teaching practice as an educator and academic, this book is for you. It's packed with ideas for educators to adopt and modify in their own pedagogical endeavors. The kindness isn't just for the classroom, but also for oneself, and in grading and syllabus development.
One thread running through the entire book is that academics are busy people, and the learning process is imperfect. Therefore, educators – whether on the K-12, college, or postgraduate levels, can find ways to build in kindness where they can. A little kindness goes a long way, after all! Denial, a realist, cautions readers that they don't have to use everything they read in the book, which is, admittedly, packed with many ideas on ways to incorporate kindness as a practice into teaching, not as a "destination" but as a "practice and a journey." She writes:
Take a couple of these ideas and weave them into your own classroom practice. Blend them with the commitments you already have…Adapt these suggestions so that they speak to who you are as an educator and human being.
The book itself is a breezy 128-page read which, as its name implies, talks about kindness towards the self, the syllabus, learning assessment, and the classroom in general.
Kindness towards oneself as an educator
The first chapter is about cultivating a practice of kindness towards the self, breaking through a mindset that academics are the sum of the work they do and can ignore things like eating and sleeping, which would be inherently unkind to one's self, especially as an academic who needs to take care of themselves to advance scholarly thought. A challenge is that self-care occurs within the context of society, Denial writes. We internalize messages from society and culture that tell us to what extent "others think we are deserving of care."
The first chapter also talks about respect, and ways that it can be built as a reciprocal process between student and teacher. Also in the self-care basket is establishing respect between students and teachers, setting healthy boundaries between work and non-work, and figuring out how to express complex feelings that occur from life events as part of our work life, since those emotions often "move with us into the academic spaces we occupy."
Crafting a helpfully kind syllabus
The second chapter is about baking kindness into a syllabus. Denial tells the story of her first syllabi being very informational, but making changes over time to make them easier to read and even an overall friendlier read, meant to serve the student's needs and establish good rapport for the school semester. Inherent in this journey was Denial's disentangling of what she wanted students to learn and how she would get to that point by the end of the semester, creating learning opportunities that could facilitate learning. Here she details an experiment in which she let students come up with their own syllabus. "Kindness helps us rethink our syllabi and to craft them as invitations to step into new worlds," she writes.
Kindness when assessing students can boost learning
In the third chapter, Denial talks about kindness in the assessment process, including grading. She used to tell her students to "do research" without going into detail about what that really meant, but these days, she's more intentional about teaching research skills. In her classes nowadays, she spends time talking about how to make a research claim using evidence as a history student. I found her discussion of what the teacher or professor thinks they are assessing vs. what they are actually assessing interesting.
One way to cultivate kindness in assessment is to give "serious thought to how we're asking students to show what they know," she writes. "What questions are we asking our students when we construct our assignments? Which questions are articulated clearly and directly, and which are implied?" In her chapter on assessments, she also talks about making learning more inclusive, for example, for people with disabilities, as well as considering the role of grading in the learning process.
Being kind in the classroom
In the fourth chapter, Denial tackles kindness in a classroom setting. While her lessons are largely about teaching college, I find them relatable to the K-12 learning environment as well. She talks about ways to make the classroom welcoming year-round, not just on the first day of school, as a kindness practice. She also discusses the idea of participation as teachable skill. She lastly discusses the role of trauma in the classroom and the importance of harm prevention by providing content warnings in the college education setting.
Classrooms are places to explore new knowledge and ideas, and that can't happen without a kindness practice for oneself, between oneself and others, and kindness to facilitate the learning journey. I have always been a big believer in the importance of kindness, but after reading this book, I am absolutely convinced that kindness is the missing piece in the US education system that can help students develop intellectually and socioemotionally.
Find A Pedagogy of Kindness on Amazon or check out our other book reviews here, including SciComm book reviews and book lists.
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