Compassion 

As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I remember a class discussion that exemplified the power of compassionate teaching. We were talking about the social constructs of identity, and the professor noticed the tension in the room as we approached the topic of gender and sexuality. Instead of pushing forward, she paused, acknowledging the potential emotional weight of the discussion and emphasizing that our well-being came first. She invited anyone who felt comfortable to share their experiences, making it clear that every perspective would be met with empathy. When I shared my story about navigating acceptance within my family, I felt a deep sense of care in the class environment. The professor’s compassionate approach created a space where we were not just academic participants, but whole people, with our struggles and emotions validated. This experience reinforced that learning can—and should—happen in environments that prioritize emotional safety and humanity. (Undergraduate student). 

Compassionate teaching recognizes the inherently social nature of learning, emphasizing the importance of supportive relationships between students and instructors. It acknowledges the emotional challenges we face and seeks to create an empathetic environment that prioritizes well-being. Compassionate pedagogy helps students and instructors challenge harmful notions of success that normalize sacrificing one’s physical and emotional health.  

What this moment requires is an acknowledgement that our students (and ourselves) are suffering and that, frankly, our students have been suffering, that they will likely continue to suffer (as, indeed, we all will), and that our pedagogies ought not to be insufferable. Indeed, this moment requires us to teach to and from a place of grief––of mourning, of exhaustion, of rage, of hopelessness, of all the goddamn emotions that emerge from human beings who are encouraged  to sideline and silence very real aspects of their lives in the interest of performing “professionalism” and demonstrating “productivity.” Indeed, without acknowledging this despair, this grief, and really sitting with the weight of what we’re facing, I’m not sure it’s possible to build a pedagogical approach that moves toward joy. (Patterson, 2021, p. 13).  

Teaching and learning are inherently social activities, grounded in the relationships between students and instructors. Compassionate, caring classrooms support the well-being of all members of the learning community and recognize the ongoing struggles of students and instructors. Teaching with compassion is a foundational characteristic of the inclusive teaching of writing and aims to create pedagogies that do not perpetuate colonial violence. 

The University of Manitoba’s Centre for Advancement of Teaching and Learning provides a helpful framework for compassionate teaching. Compassion implies understanding that “all humans experience times of suffering” and willingness to help relieve that suffering. Compassionate teaching supports students in their physical and mental well-being and challenges the harmful idea that success in university requires compromising one’s health. Compassionate pedagogy helps both students and instructors to claim the right to be well (Dickson & Summerville, 2018).  

The care work (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2019) that currie and Hubrig propose in the teaching of writing builds on disability justice principles. It necessitates a critical reflection on “the top down assumption that the instructor knows what is best for everyone in the room in all instances, at all times, forevermore” (p. 136). Rather, the classroom is a shared space and community to which instructors and students bring a multitude of lived experiences, ways of knowing, bodies, minds, backgrounds, identities and needs. To discount these diversities as irrelevant in a performance of “professionalism” exploits both students and educators (Patterson, 2021).  Inclusive teaching of writing serves to counter standards that discipline and exclude those who cannot meet thresholds of performance and productivity. Dickson and Summerville (2018) suggest that compassionate pedagogy is decolonial when rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing that are collaborative and reciprocal. Compassionate pedagogy “cannot be constructed in the abstract and imposed from above” but rather grows from the complex interactions that instructors and students develop together (Dickson & Summerville, 2018, p. 25). 

Compassionate teaching centers the social and relational nature of learning by recognizing the emotional and intellectual challenges that students face. It seeks to create a supportive and empathetic environment where the well-being of all members of the learning community is prioritized. Rather than adding to students’ burdens by denying their identities and lived experiences, compassionate teaching embraces whole-person learning, integrates diverse student experiences, and acknowledges the emotional labour involved in writing and communicating within colonial institutions.  

Suggested activities

• Share your own whole person in the processes of teaching and create safe space for students to comment on their state of being, to support each other throughout the course of a term, and to bring their experiences and positionalities into course assignments and activities 
• Recognize the emotional/affective and intellectual labor involved in writing processes, plan breathing room into course timelines, enable students to connect and debrief with each other during challenging periods of the course  
• Co-create a charter of compassion with students (Inoue, 2022)  
• Develop pedagogical practices, approaches to assessment, and summative and formative assignments that reflect the experiences, subjectivities and identities of a diverse student body 

Use cases

Annotated Bibliography

• Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Compassionate pedagogy. The University of Manitoba.
• currie, s.m., and Hubrig, A.  Care work through course design: Shifting the labour of resilience. Composition Studies, 50(2), 132-153.  
• Dickson, L., and Summerville, T. (2018). ‘The truth about stories’: Coming to compassionate pedagogy in a first-year program. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 6(3), 24-29.
• Inoue, A. (2022). Why I use a charter for compassion with my contract. Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom (2^nd edition). WAC Clearing House, 165-185. 
• Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2019). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.  
• Patterson, G.P. (2021). Loving students in the time of COVID: A dispatch from LGBT studies. Journal of Liberal Arts, 22(1), 1-16.  
• Ten principles of Disability Justice. (2015, September 17). Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility.