Towards a Compassionate Classroom: Focusing on Students, Faculty, and Ourselves
By Lydia Watson
What would a compassionate classroom look like? How do we shift from feeling bad for our students to acting on our feelings? These questions have been at the forefront of my mind since March 2020, when the global pandemic forced students and instructors worldwide to shift abruptly to online teaching and learning. Grappling with the trauma of COVID-19 in our collective Zoom spaces, we moved from feeling for one another to feeling with one another as we all shared this common human experience.
Peter Kaufman, in Teaching with Compassion, distinguishes compassion from empathy:
“Whereas empathy involves placing oneself metaphorically in the shoes of another (I feel your pain), compassion draws on the capacity to be present in the face of suffering and selflessly seek to eliminate it where it occurs (‘I will work to relieve your pain’).” (p. xix).
What does this look like in our teaching practice?
Compassion for Students
Seeing students as whole people and acknowledging their lives beyond the classroom can be a powerful practice. Gachago, Pallitt, and Bali’s (2022) framework for compassionate learning design emphasizes:
- Increasing learner agency by implementing their feedback into lessons and co-creating classroom activities
- Recognizing affect and the impact of wellbeing on learning. Research done by UBC professor, Sally Willis Stewart supports that students not only appreciate it when their emotions and well-being are acknowledged by their instructors, they feel they can be more successful in their learning.
- Implementing humanizing and trauma-informed pedagogies. The work of Michelle Pacansky-Brock, though related to online teaching, discusses practices for all learners. McMaster University has designed a resource which includes research and activities devoted to trauma informed pedagogies.
Compassion for Colleagues
As Brené Brown (2021) writes,
“Compassion is not a practice of ‘better than’ or ‘I can fix you’ – it’s a practice based in the beauty and pain of shared humanity.” (p.139).
Continuing to support one another by listening to each other’s experiences, sharing ideas and knowledge openly, being vulnerable and accepting to change, and supporting those feeling stuck or overwhelmed can be some of the ways we can do this. Gachago, Palitt, and Bali’s (2022) framework for compassionate learning design discuss ways we can move from empathy to an action of compassion for our colleagues.
Self-Compassion
A compassionate classroom needs to begin with nurturing our own hearts and taking care of ourselves. Kristin Neff’s (2003) groundbreaking research on self-compassion discusses it as a radical act of necessity- we cannot be compassionate towards others unless we are to ourselves. This can involve recognizing our own struggles and limitations, being kind to ourselves when facing challenges, and remembering our experiences as students. Neff’s website has some great free resources that support these practices.
I invite you to imagine what your compassionate classroom looks like and what your radical acts will be like for your students, for your colleagues and for yourselves. Then, I encourage you to share them. Perhaps in the future we can co-create a compassionate campus.
Artwork by April Berger, Extravaganza, mixed media (2023)
Deeper Dive
Interested in taking a deeper dive into these ideas? Check out the resources below:
Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the heart: Mapping meaningful connection and the language of human experience. Random House.
Gachago, D., Bali, M., & Pallit, N. (2022). Compassionate learning design as a critical approach to instructional design. Toward a Critical Instructional Design.
Kaufman, P., & Schipper, J. (2018). Teaching with compassion: An educator’s oath to teach from the heart. Rowman & Littlefield.
Neff, K. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and Identity, 2(2), 85-101.
Pacansky-Brock, M. (n.d.). Humanizing infographic 2.0. Retrieved from https://brocansky.com/humanizing/infographic2
Pallit, N., Bali, M., & Gachago, D. (2022). Academic development as compassionate learning design: Cases from South Africa and Egypt. In T. Jaffer, S. Govender & L. Czerniewicz (Eds.), Learning Design Voices. [Advance preprint]
Stewart, S., & Eikenaar, J. (n.d.). The TEACHERS Project: Training & engaging academics to support student wellbeing. University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://wellbeing.ubc.ca/teachers-project-training-engaging-academics-support-student-wellbeing
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