Teaching with Kindness

Every year, I try to read one book on teaching. This week, I read Catherine Denial’s (which could be a pen name, but I’m honestly not sure) A Pedagogy of Kindness (2024). I hoped that it would speak to my ongoing efforts to be a more engaged, thoughtful, and (for lack of a better word) kind teacher. As any number of my colleagues have observed, this generation of students appear to need more than the usual share of kindness that is part of the teaching encounter. Perhaps it is the long tail of their experiences with COVID, perhaps it is a kind of trauma produced by the increasingly belligerent character of the public sphere, or maybe it’s just that their expectations for education have changed since I first started teaching. Whatever the reason, it feels like the current generation of students struggle to balance the pressures of higher education, family, and, often, work. Kindness seems like the least we can do if it ensures that our students are better able to do the hard work of learning.

Denial observes that kindness starts at home in some ways. That as instructors, we have to learn to be kind to ourselves and develop strategies and practices that support self-care. In many ways, we too feel the pressures associated with increasingly vituperative attacks on higher education and our students, the growing reach of austerity and economic precarity, and the changing character of academic work. In short, there are plenty of reasons to be kind to ourselves these days and attentiveness to our own state will often support similar generosity toward our students.

Denial’s advice for how we express kindness toward our students reflects primarily anticipating the diversity of our students needs. Or as we might say in Ohio: “meeting the student where they’re at.”  This involves being deliberate for how we design our syllabus and structure our classes. For Denial, who is a historian, this means tempering our predilection for texts and writing and recognizing that the current generation of students will engage with through multiple media. I know that some of my colleagues have been particularly successful with these approaches. It demonstrates a willingness to see history as more than simply disciplinary practice centered on studying an producing texts. Instead, Denial embraces disciplinary practice that is expansive and focuses on studying the past using a range of methods and strategies to both understand past events and situation and to produce new forms of historical knowledge. I’m skeptical, but the archaeologist in me tentatively applauds this more pluralistic view of disciplinary knowledge making. 

One thing that I wish she had discussed more carefully is the place that student resistance played in the classroom and university experience. In general, she painted a rather rosy picture of students who seem only too willing to meet instructor’s kindness with heightened zeal for the class and the discipline. Now, I know that some of this is the genre of this kind of book: it proposes solutions and asserts effectiveness rather than revealing more of the complicated classroom dynamics that it’s readers know only too well. At the same time, I feel like part of the key value of college for students is to resist. That is to ignore kindness — if not reject it entirely — in the name of asserting identities, priorities, and lifestyles that seek to extract value from the university experience despite rather than because of the assessed education goals. After all, these are students who in college come to recognize systems under which society will expect them to operate. I’m not suggesting that Denial is proposing an “add kindness and stir” solution to structural problems. She is clearly neither naive nor a shill for her institution, necessarily, but one wonders whether kindness could become another way to preach “civility,” if it not tempered with space for resistance?