A new Dean's blog entry:
I continue to be attracted to books that combine the features of the manifesto, memoir, and professional advice. These kinds of books often offer authentic personal experience and practical solutions. Most recently, I thumbed through an example of the genre that focuses on the place of teaching and the role of care and compassion for students. In her introduction to A Pedagogy of Kindness (2019), author Catherine Denial doesn’t mince words about what is absent from the current priorities in higher education.
“Academia is not, by and large, a kind place. The engine of higher ed is fueled by stories of individualism, competition, prestige, and distrust.” When it comes to our students, she adds, our academic culture is dominated by “a generalized suspicion of students — they’ll cheat; they won’t do the reading; they’ll never come to class.” This hermeneutics of suspicion has only intensified with the ever-accelerating use of artificial intelligence and our crazed efforts to detect it in assignments.
Originally socialized into an academia championing individual achievement, competition, and distrust, Catherine Denial wants us to consider replacing suspicion and distrust with “believing people, and believing in people,” and she celebrates kindness (which is not the same as “being nice”) as the missing element in U.S. education, an element that can help students develop intellectually and socio-emotionally. Based on her experience as a student, graduate assistant, and instructor at several institutions, she recommends we should be kind to ourselves as educators, craft helpfully kind syllabi, devise kind forms of assessment, and be kind in the classroom.
A Pedagogy of Kindness contains numerous recommendations, and Catherine Denial is way too smart to think that her readers will include all of them into their practices. However: Perhaps you find new explanations about why students don’t tell us about the real reasons for being late on an assignment; perhaps you may replace unattended office hours with lively group work sessions; or you may decide to elevate students from passive recipients of information to partners in the learning process. I know many of us are thinking about some these matters all the time, but the condensed manner and deep commitment with which A Pedagogy of Kindness addresses them is refreshing. As I was reading, it dawned on me that many of the recommendations create some of the same kinds of engagement we find successful in the teaching of Vertically Integrated Projects, flipped classrooms, integrated learning, and internships. However, the book’s goals are much more comprehensive, even if you can easily zoom through its 182 pages in about three hours.
If you agree that we shouldn’t go on together with suspicious minds, take a peek at A Pedagogy of Kindness. If you think more “rigor” is all we need in higher ed, prepare to have your convictions challenged.
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