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This morning I am revisiting @cjdenial 's "A Pedagogy of Kindness" in @HybridPed for its focus on believing in students, trusting students, and interacting with students with meaning in all facets in teaching: https://hybridpedagogy.org/pedagogy-of-kindness/
I'm going to tweet some quotes from the article and discuss why I find the article compelling.
"Believing in students means seeing them as collaborators — believing they have valuable contributions to make to the way in which syllabi, assignments, and assessments are designed, and life experiences that should be respected in the classroom"
Taking the stance that students are collaborators in the classroom, that students get a stake in classroom policies, assignment design, and even readings for the class invites students to share their needs for a learning environment.
Collaborating with students reminds me of another @HybridPed article by @amyadele who discloses her journey of moving away from a top-down approach in the classroom to working with students in "Do You Trust Your Students?" https://hybridpedagogy.org/do-you-trust-your-students/
In Amy's article she cites a 1977 speech by Adrienne Rich on women in university--women in a college who dare go against the grain and get their college education--but what it also means to be courageous to commit to a life or a practice that isn't rooted in "old ways."
Daring to operate with a pedagogy of kindness and root out the old ways of teaching, I find Adam Heidebrink-Bruno's 2014 @HybridPed article on "Syllabus as Manifesto" which began to change my thinking on classroom policies and practices prescient to @cjdenial 's article.
Quoting Heidebrink-Bruno, "Over time, the syllabus has become perfunctory. University policies and classroom expectations are the first impressions that we make in our classrooms." +
- "Using such a prescriptive approach to classroom culture, however, damages the social, cultural, and educative potential of formal schooling."
And, "And while an educator may quickly jot down that “participation is worth 20% of your grade” or “office hours by request,” it is a wholly different experience to consider this rhetoric in relation to its implied ideologies."
Here's his article: https://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-critical-approach-classroom-culture/
Back to @cjdenial 's work who cites @Jessifer on ungrading--which admittedly I slowly integrated into classes in 2017, and I have fully embraced in 2020 in my graduate classes, and in 2018 embraced partially in my undergrad classes (I'm evolving).
In @Jessifer 's article on ungrading: https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade/ he writes that he has not put a grade on student work since 2001. Why? Do grades matter? No, not really. What matters, to me at least, is the authentic pursuit of learning.
However, @cjdenial doesn't stop with classroom policy or with assessment, she also works in accessibility, and how she views access in concert with a pedagogy of kindness. Again, I will quote:
"I’ve also begun to think of my classes in terms of universal design." +
"For many years I taught with the idea that there was a well-established, academic norm that was fair and impartial, and my job was to make accommodations available for those students who had particular disabilities, or faced particular challenges in meeting that norm."
"I no longer believe in such a practice."
" I’ve begun the long work of redesigning my lessons and assignments so that everyone is a full participant."
Like @cjdenial , I have also rethought my teaching in terms of Universal Design, which began with a collaborative article I wrote with Mariana Grohowski and Kris Blair.
Mariana integrated Universal Design for her contribution tot he article, which you can read more about here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/d/drc/mpub7820727/1:4/--making-space-writing-instruction-infrastructure?g=dculture;rgn=div1;view=fulltext;xc=1
The experience of working with Mare and Kris on this collaborative article, when Mare and I were just graduate students with Kris mentoring us along the way, first taught me about Universal Design, and it planted some seeds.
Those seeds pushed through when I started work at what was the 5th most diverse university in the national for racial and ethnic diversity (it's now one of many in the 6th slot).
I kept hearing from students, witnessing, observing struggles with learning environments. Some students did not always want to seek out an accommodation for personal reasons. I realized that my practices in teaching--because I learned from my students--were not fully accessible.
So, I made some changes to align courses with access. I'm still working on this, as it's not 100% percent accessible, but the practices in place open access.
Once I changed my policies, practices, and assessment, I began to align my teaching with, a pedagogy of kindness, or what bell hooks says way back in the day in Teaching to Transgress +
"When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, too confess." (21)
"Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process." (21)
"Progressive professors working to transform the curriculum is that it does not reflect biases or reinforce systems of domination are most often the individuals willing to take the risks that engaged pedagogy requires and to make their teaching practices a site of resistance" 21
If you were to ask me my philosophy of teaching, my pedagogy, and what I think are student-centered and learning-centered practices, I would cite these sources, because, for me, the act of teaching means engaging students critically (Freire) for empowerment.
And, that type of teaching begins and ends in a classroom with policies, practices, assessments, and access. It is the whole package.
I am a progressive educator. Thank you for coming to my Twitter thread.
