Webinar recording

A Pedagogy of Kindness: Compassion Toward the Self

Catherine Denial

Catherine Denial

This page contains the proceedings of the Show and Share webinar led by Catherine Denial. In this webinar, Catherine discussed how a pedagogy of kindness can help educators become more compassionate towards themselves and their students.

-[Niya] So, I’m delighted to have y’all here today and introduce our host, Cate Denial. Cate has already contributed so much to our platform and the higher ed world. She is developed a course for us on an ‘Introduction to a Pedagogy of Kindness’, the link which I’ve shared in the chat. And she was gracious enough to chat with me for a little while, about that pedagogy and practice and I’ve also shared the link there as well. Cate is a Bright Distinguished Professor of American History, Chair of the History department and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, USA. And Cate is going to lead this webinar on a pedagogy of kindness for us today. Cate, I’ll turn it over to you. 

– [Cate] Good afternoon, good evening, good morning, wherever you are in the world everyone, I am going to put a couple of things in the chat that are going to help us out. The first is a link to my Google Slides, so that if you want to follow along with those and if it’s easier for you for accessibility reasons to do that please click on through and you can see all of them. I will also share a link to our Padlet just a little bit later into the proceedings. So let me share my screen with you. Here we go. A pedagogy of kindness, compassion towards the self. So welcome. I saw that you were already are doing this in the chat but please if you haven’t already tell us where you are calling in from in the world. We would love to see that information about you. And please feel free to use the chat throughout to interact with one another and to interact with our hosts. My ability to see the chat will be a little bit limited but I will definitely keep up with it as I can. So here is our agenda for our little workshop today. First we’re going to get to know me just a little bit. Second, we are going to define our terms. Then we are going to think about how being kind to the self is not just about self-care, it’s about more than that. We are going to think about some actionable steps that will help you be kind to yourself. And then we are going to say, spend some time sharing your tips and your ideas for being kind to yourself and keeping that moving. So this is me. I am Cate Denial and as Niya said, I am the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History, Chair of the History department, and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. This is where I’m originally from. I am originally from Sheffield in England and I am a first-generation college student. So this is a photo of the University of Nottingham in the UK, which is where I went and got my undergraduate degree. In 1994, I came to the States to get my master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. And then I got my PhD at the University of Iowa in 2005. I then was lucky enough to get a position at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and I have been working there ever since. So that’s sort of the professional stuff. But the more interesting stuff is that my favorite movie that I’ve watched recently is The Eight Mountains which is an Italian movie with an actor that I adore. I am reading, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow right now, I love Captain America in all his many incarnations and in my spare time I do the windows and the merchandising for my friend’s brand-new jam store. So, it’s other fine foods too but mostly the focus is on the jam that she makes, so that’s really, really fun. I am super pleased to meet you and to be with you here this afternoon.  

So kindness towards the self, what does this actually mean? Let’s start by defining our terms. So kindness is not a practice that appears in a vacuum. If we want to be kind to other people to create classroom experiences that are alive with compassion for absolutely everyone involved, we have to start by being kind to ourselves. It’s not just about self-care. Self-care is really popular as an expression, as an idea. But in its most lackluster formulation, self-care is really sort of distilled down to bubble baths or drinking a good cup of tea and we’re talking about something more than that. Self-care should mean securing the time, energy, creativity, and rest that we need to support our existence in all its wonderful, frustrating, liberating complexity. So kindness I would say refines the concept of self-care. It makes space for reconciliation, forgiveness, and for accountability. Kindness understands our imperfections, our frailties, and the things that we do not know. It suggests that we can’t move forward in the world without the opportunity to pardon ourselves for our mistakes. And I want to give you sort of a concrete sense of what this might mean. So kindness holds us accountable. It doesn’t just suggest that we let things go without examining them. It doesn’t mean that we are going to not consider our positionality in the world or assimilate knowledge into our understanding of who we are and what we prioritise. Sorry, I went backwards there. So here’s my concrete example. These are from ground rules that I use in my classroom. They are things I developed with Gabrielle Raley-Karlin at Knox College, and which we used as sort of a templates, some ideas, and some language that we got from the Program and Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan. So this is a really good demonstration of what kindness towards itself is and that accountability I was talking about. In my classes, we say, “We will remember that all of us have learned misinformation about ourselves, our social groups, and other social groups. Discrimination functions, in part, by keeping us uninformed. We will not blame ourselves or others for getting something wrong on the first try. After we have learned new information, however, we’ll hold ourselves and others accountable for that information.” So again, this is kindness towards the self, it’s accountability rather than just excusing things.  

So if we were to dismiss the places in the world where we trip up, whether that’s in word or thought or action, and if we did not reflect on the impact of each of those things, that would simply be us being nice. We would be relieving ourselves of the responsibility to prioritise, sorry, to not prioritise feeling good and to make sure that we are being just. So what does this all add up to? These ideas are sort of abstract at the moment. They don’t tell us how to find space within the overwhelming press of our working lives as we try and get through graduate school or pay the bills or secure our benefits or get a permanent job or get our contract renewed and make tenure or manage our load and teach and all the things I haven’t listed there that are part of our lives. But there are things that do belong to us, times, practices, and strategies that we get to craft and crucially boundaries that we need to put in place and maintain. The things that we control are usually small. They’re incremental decisions that can shape a day. We can implement changes that have a meaningful impact on our wellbeing and the store of compassion that we have to direct elsewhere, however. And here’s a quote from adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy. She says, “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale… Grace Lee Boggs articulated it in what might be the most used quote of my life. ‘Transform yourself to transform the world.'” So here are some actionable steps for implementing kindness towards the self.  

  • The first is limit the amount of time that you attend to your email. So, on my syllabus and in person, I tell my students that I am not available on weekends and that I generally log off about eight o’clock every evening. Now you may or may not find that that sort of arrangement works for you. Whatever does work for you though make sure you communicate it clearly and make sure that you do have whole afternoons, whole mornings where you are not on email and subject to other people’s demands.
  • Block time off on your calendar for food and rest. I was diagnosed in July of 2022 as a type two diabetic and that was when I realised just how much I hadn’t done either of these things. I would subsist on string cheese and tiny little Snickers bars to get me through a whole workday. I would not make sure that I had enough time to recover from my workday. And, so, I learned because of the diabetes that I must prioritise those things, that it shouldn’t take a diabetes diagnosis to make us prioritise this stuff for ourselves. So put on your calendar when you are going to eat, put on your calendar when you are going to rest, and consider those things non-negotiable as if you were turning up to a meeting with your provost or your dean or your chancellor or whomever, okay.  
  • Put your commute on your calendar. So, most of us don’t enjoy our commutes, I don’t think. I mean if we had to commute and we lived exactly where we wanted to, our commutes would be pretty small, but there were all kinds of reasons that we do have to commute. So put that time on your calendar and think of it when you think of your workday. We have a finite amount of energy that we can use every single day and we use some of it on our commute to and from work. So, make sure it’s on your calendar. Do not over-commit yourself in this between times so that you are sort of wasted by the end of the day. And if you are someone who works from home, if you are a remote instructor for example, there you might consider creating a commute for yourself. So my office that you are sort of looking at right now is in the back of my living room. And if you look over there you can see the back of one of the EZ chairs in my fireplace and stuff. I have a ritual where I put on some essential oils in my oil burner, I listen to certain music before I get going on my workday and it eases the transition between being at home and being at work. That’s something that can really help, little rituals that mark, I am not available anymore. This now is my time.  
  • Build catch up days into your syllabus. Now this is easier if you are in some countries than in others because it depends a lot on the prescriptions that you get from your institution and from the larger system of higher ed. But where possible, when you’re making your syllabus think about including a couple of days that are just blank catch-up days. We will absolutely always use them. You get sick, the students get sick, something runs over, a discussion takes longer than we think. Maybe students got confused about something that they really got very quickly last year but you have to spend more time on it this time around. Those catch-up days are there for a reason so that you don’t have to do quite so much of a dance to catch up afterwards. And if you don’t use them for any of those things that I just discussed you can take them as a mental health day for you and for your students and they will love you for it, you will also see the benefit.  
  • Along with that, I would suggest some really careful and thoughtful planning about your courses. So, a concrete example of this is that when we have a due date and our students are handing in an assignment, we may give ourselves some time that week where we schedule that we’re going to grade. If, however, our students have some kind of calamity, they need an extension, and we do offer them the flexibility to be able to turn something in a little bit later, then we run out of time to grade it, right? And then it becomes a bigger issue for us and all the other things we have to do and sometimes it becomes a problem for our students too. So, a good bit of planning is to plan for grading for two weeks out from when those assignments are due, as an example, so that you have the time and opportunity to get flexibility in but also you are not overburdening yourself.  
  • “Guard your yes.” I got this from Rene Brooks who is an ADHD counselor. She works a lot with black women in the United States. Her false phrase is, “guard your yes with your life.” And this is sort of the corollary to say no to some stuff, right? But it is hard to say no. So, thinking about guarding your yes and using your yes sparingly has been more helpful for me than thinking about no’s. As has another phrase that I got from Beth Gruppy which is, “If it’s not a strong yes, it’s a hell no.” So there you think about the quality of the yes. Are you saying like, “Well I could do this, I guess I might get something out of it.” Or are you thinking, “I am 100% on board with this. This is going to bring me satisfaction and joy.” Knowing the difference between the kind of yeses that we’re offering helps us to determine where we do need to say, “I’m sorry, it’s not possible for me to do that right now.”  
  • And the last thing is create community. We need community, we are social creatures, and that community doesn’t have to be face-to-face. We’re still in a pandemic, we are still people who are immunocompromised and have disabilities and chronic illnesses. We are people who maybe need to take care of our family as well as doing our jobs literally in the same space at the same time. There are all kinds of reasons that we might seek community online as well as offline, but prioritising community and finding like-minded people is essential in giving us sort of a buoyancy so that we can survive some of the more trying moments in our teaching lives. So it might be that you find your community as I have done with a lot of mine on somewhere like Twitter or Mastodon or Sprouts or Post. It might be that your community is in a local organisation that you frequent. Maybe it’s your bowling league, maybe it’s a place of worship for you. Wherever it is, find it. And if you don’t have it, think really intentionally about what sort of community you are looking for, and then think about how you can find it. It takes a little time to build one, but those communities are sustaining for us.  

So that’s some of my suggestions and I want you to be able to recommend some things too. So, we have a Padlet, that I would love for you to be able to open. And I’m actually going to shut down my slides here so that we can click over to the Padlet and sort of see that all together. So, one second while I stop sharing. And I will paste this also into the chat and that’s the spaces you will be able to see where you can share your resources on being kind and share your hints and tips. There is a tremendous wealth of knowledge in the room about things that are kind and sustaining to us. So please feel free to put those into the Padlet. And I will look back through the chat here ’cause I see that there are a couple of questions. Peggy saying that, “There aren’t any catch up days but there were to be determined days.” So, use those. That’s a brilliant strategy. I love that very, very much. Please put into the chat any questions that you have for me. I would love to be able to answer them or things that you might want to ask other people who are here too. And if anybody is unsure about how to use Padlet just let us know and we will be glad to jump in and help you with that. And maybe those of you who are in the room can think about which of the things that I suggested are things that resonate with you. Where do you anticipate some obstacles in putting some of them into place? What sort of thoughts do you have? 

– [Niya] I really appreciated the tidbit that you shared about the different kinds of yes that we might consider because I’m someone who has a hard time saying no. So, focusing on the yes but also the qualitative factors around the yes or how much I want to engage with it is helpful too ’cause I think those nuances are important to notice but maybe we don’t always notice them. 

– [Cate] And there’s another phrase that I sometimes use and I’m going to forget the name of the author who offered it up. I’m blanking. But the question is, “Does this decision make me feel big or small?” And so that’s sort of another qualitive framework, for am I about to agree to something that is going to help amplify the things that I love and the work that I love? Or is this something that is liable to crush me? So, does it make me feel big or does it make me feel small? I think is another question that sometimes helps. Rebecca, I can see you said having a brain break by walking around campus. That’s a great idea as is scheduling it, right. Like you said, actually putting that in there. I am finishing up the revisions on my book about a pedagogy of kindness right now and I have to sort of set a timer for myself because I will try and push through and keep writing and I need to stop sort of every hour or so and walk away from the computer, do something else. So same thing, I really have to be good about like scheduling that time to give my brain a break. “So how do you balance the pedagogy of kindness and the more rigorous rules around academic regulations with students?” Leanne, where  are you in the world? The UK. Okay, so the UK is really tough, right. Because you have to have your modules done so far in advance and there are like centralised places that decide whether or not students can get extensions. When I was a student at the University of Nottingham, for example, I threw up on my way to one of my final exams at the end of the year and the professor couldn’t tell me whether or not I could skip it. He had to ask someone else. And then they sent me to student health and they put me full of morphine and had me sit the exam on morphine rather than miss it. So just to say the UK is really, really tricky. So what I try to do there is I’ve recommended to friends and colleagues in the UK building in some time in the class itself to maybe give a little bit of flexibility. So is there a possibility for your students to actually work on their assignment for part of the class period? For example, a workshop environment where everybody is working at the same time and you are there to offer them your feedback and your skills, that can lift some of the burden that’s on your students but also on you because you’re able to answer those questions there instead of getting a dozen emails later in the night. And if there are other people here from the UK, I would love to hear what you have done and how you have so created some of that flexibility for yourself.  

I agree. Good to start from a place of kindness and thinking about that framing, when we’re making these decisions. I see things are popping up on the Padlet. There’s a self-care bingo card, that’s great. “20 minutes floating in the pool to reset my brain.” Oh my goodness. Well first of all, I live in Illinois which for those of you who don’t know the United States is very, very cold half the year. So that would not work for me half the year but for the other half of the year. That sounds blissful. I love the idea of just being able to just do something with my body instead of my brain for a little bit. And so, maybe if you are not in the climate or you don’t have a pool, what is something else that can take you out of your thinking self and into your embodied self? Those kind of breaks, whether they’re 10 minutes or half an hour are so, so good for us. And it doesn’t have to be, going out and walking or doing something physical in that sense. Very often when I need a brain break, I will go knit for just a couple of rows because it’s soothing and repetitive and I’m not having to think about how to construct a sentence or how to get someone to do something in class. I’m just repeatedly making the same motion over and over and it helps to sort of clear the fog a little bit.  

Mary, yes, absolutely it can float in that will never go away. And Emma, yeah, Emma was that your suggestion about floating in the pool? ‘Cause I love it.  

Let’s see what else we have here. Exercise and meditation, both great strategies, and I like the pairing of those because not all of us are able to physically get out and about. Right?. And so, not all of us are able to move our bodies in ways that might be considered exercise. So having something like meditation also is a great idea. And meditation people often think is about clearing your mind and just having empty thoughts. But meditation is actually just about noticing those thoughts and going, that’s a thought, that’s a thought, that’s a thought, and going back to your breath at its most simple. So, it’s something that’s really easy to do. And portable, and you can do it in your office, you can do it in your car, you can do it at home.  

“The self-care Bingo card to the first-year students last semester and left some space is blank.” What a great idea. I have a couple of handouts that I use that have big lists of self-care activities that they can sort of check off but I love the intentional part of leaving some space so that students can think about what really works for them. That’s a great idea.  

“Commit to praising a colleague or a student at least once a day. It makes them, and you feel good.” I love that. I tend to do that a lot when I’m on social media. When something goes by and someone I absolutely don’t know says, “I just got a promotion or this thing went really well, my book was published, I had an article.” I always stop and at least like that post, sometimes I will say congratulations. Doesn’t matter that I don’t know them. I’m just really, really glad to be part of a chorus of voices saying like, “Well done, this is awesome.” So, thank you for that.  

Yoga with Adriene. I start yoga with Adriene every January 1st and maintain it for at least five days. But Yoga with Adriene is a wonderful resource. A free yoga videos for anybody who doesn’t have classes or doesn’t want to be in a class environment during the pandemic too. Lots of self-care Bingo.  

“Scheduling time for your priorities first.” I do that too. I make sure that my writing is the first thing that I do in a morning and then I move on to the things that I have to do for other people.  

“The prioritising, grading and scheduling the work week, so there’s a day to grade after the assignments are due.” That’s a great idea. Consider having another one of those days a week later, because then you have some flexibility and the students have a little bit of flexibility too.  

Any other questions, comments?  

I really like this post that says that whoever posted it, “Tracks their comments and replies to students discussion posts to make sure that everybody gets a response.” That’s a wonderful way of doing things. And I like that it’s not everybody gets a response every single time, right, but it’s a response across the breadth of the semester, which is wonderful. I also saw the remark about courage. “Having the courage to be vulnerable and real.” Being vulnerable I think is a really important part of teaching, and it’s a really difficult part of teaching and knowing what your own vulnerability can and cannot be because of your positionality, whether you’re full-time, part-time, whether you are a contracted employee, whether you’re tenured, all of those things, where you are in the world, all of those things can really have an impact on what degree you feel comfortable being vulnerable with your students with. But that vulnerability I think is sort of the wobble, the key. The wobble is a thing I’ve borrowed from Karen Costa to give her credit, but it’s that tipping point, the place where we find some balance.  

Any other questions, comments, additions to the Padlet? Well, I think our little workshop here was supposed to last about 30 minutes today. Am I right, Nia, Niya? Sorry. 

– [Niya] No, you’re fine. Yeah, you’re right. 

– [Cate] So thank you so, so much to everybody for being here, for contributing, for asking questions, and sharing your really wonderful ideas with one another. And thank you to OneHE, it was the good people at OneHE who suggested the Padlet. So props to them for making this so interactive. It’s wonderful. 

– [Niya] Well, we really-   

– [Cate] Thank you, everybody. 

– [Niya] Hey, thank you so much and thank you to everyone who attended. This will eventually be available as a recording in the platform. I also did just want to put into the chat that we have another webinar next Wednesday the 22nd on co-designing workshops and using video briefs to engage students. But back to the webinar today, Cate, thank you so much for sharing all of this advice and all of this prompt for self-reflection for us to think about how we can be kind to ourselves and others. I’m so glad this is a conversation happening not just in higher ed, but kind of across the world. 

In this Show and Share webinar, Catherine Denial explored what it means to expand our definitions of self-care to include kindness and consider why kindness toward the self is necessary if we are to extend kindness to our students. Catherine Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History, Chair of the History department, and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, USA. Cate is also an expert on a pedagogy of kindness and is currently working on a book by the same name, under contract with West Virginia University Press.

If you’ve enjoyed this webinar, you might also want to take Catherine’s course on Introduction to a Pedagogy of Kindness.

The Padlet below was created based on the chat comments during the session. We encourage you to still participate by sharing links to useful resources, your thoughts, and ideas.

Download the webinar slides (PDF, 10 MB)

Download the webinar slides (PowerPoint, 15 MB)

DISCUSSION

What steps do you take to implement kindness towards yourself? 

Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.

Made with Padlet