The Kind Academic

I recently read an article about whether compassion in higher education is the “fashion or future” for relational pedagogy (Waddington & Bonaparte, 2024). This got me thinking about my relationship with the concept of kindness

 I’ve always considered myself a generally kind person, yet it feels like I slipped into the pedagogy of kindness practice and research by accident. I learned about the term pedagogy of kindness on some random Google Scholar rabbit hole descent.

I was thrilled to find that there’s a teaching philosophy that so closely mirrors my teaching values of respect, empathy and trust. I picked up the term and ran with it. The last six months of my academic life have been spent building relationships and connections with other academics who align with similar values both in my institution and outside of it.

However, while I’m loving this journey, I am very aware that kindness can be seen as a band-aid to plaster over wounds within the academy. Yes, it’s great to exhibit kindness towards students and staff at universities, but this doesn’t take away the negative impacts of neoliberalism at the university and outside of it. 

I can be understanding, supportive, and, yes, kind to my students and colleagues and yet they and I are still going to be part of the dog-eats-dog capitalist world where we all feel we need to work harder to earn more to live better.  We all know the resultant stresses that come from this, including physical and mental burnout. Neoliberalism is not good for our health.

In such a setting, is kindness enough? In stumbling across the Pedagogy of Kindness, have I found a global cure or merely a lollipop to take away the sting? Is the Pedagogy of Kindness simply a buzzword, a fad?

Waddington and Bonaparte (2024) call for critical compassion in higher education,  one that doesn’t erase the realities  of academic life but instead confronts them by “putting humanity ‘on display’” (2024, p6) . This approach, they argue, is the antidote to the superficiality that can often accompany kindness in education.

Surely, this is how we prevent the pedagogy of kindness from becoming just another passing trend. The kindness my colleagues and I promote across our institution and beyond must stay clear of over-simplicity and naivety. It needs to confront challenges faced by all stakeholders within high education head-on, openly and honestly. It needs to acknowledge  the messy realities that students and staff face.

For students, this will involve a deep dive into thorny issues of  societal belonging, identity, privilege  and the implications of the lack thereof.  For staff, we must consider the pressures of academic life and real life in 2024.

In my research, in this blog, and in my teaching practice, I am committed to a brand of kindness that is critical. Only by doing so can I steer clear of the superficial allure of kindness as a passing trend or fashion.

References

Waddington, K. and Bonaparte, B., 2024. Compassion in higher education: fashion or future for relational pedagogies? Higher Education Research & Development, pp.1-8.