Clearing Space for Kindness

“Kindness” is not a concept that I always associate with higher education, or with education in general. Learning is difficult, but that inherent challenge has been compounded by the human and thus imperfect systems that we’ve built:

Grading.

Ranking.

Prize Days and Spelling Bees.

Attendance requirements that punish the chronically ill.

The endless, disheartening casualization of higher education faculty and staff ranks, which treats us all as replaceable widgets (while threatening the securely employed with potential redundancy).

Public posting of test marks, which punishes nearly everyone, but especially those who struggle with reading, or writing, or math.

All-or-nothing Final Exams, scheduled at the time of the term when class members are most exhausted and least likely to be doing deep learning. (Oof–law school folks, you need to fix this.)

All of these are on my mind this week.

But so is kindness, because I’m doing a 4-week online reading group through BC Campus and we’re reading Cate Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness.

Denial, importantly, notes that kindness is not niceness. It’s authentic compassion and care, but it’s not about endless self-sacrifice and burnout.

It’s hard to sustain. Many forces oppose it.

Education serves a number of social and economic purposes that are fundamentally capitalist in nature, and I say this from a west coast Canadian vantage point where our approach is significantly more relaxed.

I’ve worked in contexts where education is all about gaining a competitive advantage.

Small children are marched to foreign language classes and multiple skill-building activities that will look good on applications for kindergarten. Joy is even leached out of play, which becomes preparation for learning.

I was once tasked with improving my daughter’s scissor skills with daily practice sessions; this was apparently crucial to her future success and happiness. A whole paragraph appeared on a report card, cautioning that despite the fact that our four-year-old kid was reading herself Charlotte’s Web, her scissor impediment might hold her back. It was not a kindergarten class with much joy, perhaps because it was the teacher’s first year below Grade 4 level and she hadn’t picked the teaching assignment.

This is a good week for thinking about education and joy in the same sentence. Without a pedagogy of kindness, I don’t think we get to a pedagogy of joy and pleasure.

Huge thanks to Denial for her important work and to BC Campus’s Helena Prins for the skilled book group facilitation.