Let’s embrace compassionate pedagogy for a more humane academy

Creating compassionate campuses to promote student mental health and well-being is now, quite rightly, seen as a priority. 

For example, Nurture-U is a research project that finds better ways to support university students with their well-being and mental health. It represents research for students, with students and by students, and is partnered with the Canadian U-Flourish programme. 

In the US, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University promotes, supports and carries out rigorous scientific studies of compassion. 

Working with students-as-partners is a well-established approach to developing perspectives, practices and policies on how students and staff can work together to enhance learning and teaching in higher education. The Society for Research into Higher Education has funded a small-scale study into the development of compassionate pedagogical practice, with undergraduate psychology students as co-researchers at the University of Westminster. This research led to a working definition of compassionate pedagogy as:

Recognising and noticing the difference, discrimination and bias in how people are being treated, how students are learning and being taught, and the compassionate actions – both strategic and small – that we all need to take to promote and support student and staff well-being. 

Challenging the language of suffering

The above definition challenges the language of suffering that surrounds compassion, based on its Latin root compati, which means “to suffer with”. It offers a more critical, intersectional perspective when thinking about how compassion is used and talked about in a higher education context. 

• How to make campuses and courses more compassionate
• Expectation and compassion: two sides of the coin for successful learning outcomes
• Embracing a compassionate approach in higher education

This is not to say that student and staff suffering and poor mental health should be ignored or minimised. Nor does it negate the need for trauma-informed pedagogy. Instead, it raises the question of the extent to which the day-to-day experience of students and staff might cause – or exacerbate – suffering. This requires an alertness to compassion gaps, and unintended or adverse consequences of compassionate policies and practices, as revealed by two recent UK qualitative studies. 

Be aware of unintended consequences 

Neil Armstrong and Nicola Byrom have illustrated how “structural compassion” – such as mitigating circumstances arrangements and adjustments, designed to accommodate student health needs or life crises such as bereavement – can become potentially harmful, blunt bureaucratic instruments. 

Fiona Denney’s research found that “formalised” compassion processes introduced during the pandemic, such as no detriment policies that allowed students to make multiple claims for the impact of Covid on their assessments, prioritised compassion for students over the well-being of staff.

Tools, techniques and training

Researchers at the University of Derby are developing compassion-based interventions and training across different educational settings and with different groups of individuals, including staff, pupils and higher education students. The Nurture-U project has developed the Compassionate Campus initiative at the University of Exeter and King’s College London, based on student stories and experiences. 

A reverse mentoring scheme, between minoritised undergraduate psychology students and senior university leaders, will be extended to youth ambassadors from a social enterprise working with disadvantaged and vulnerable young people, to mentor senior leaders. The aim is for young people to gain access to resources and relationships to enhance their education and employability. Initiatives such as these offer hope for a more humane academy, but there are still at least three challenges ahead. 

Challenges ahead

First, we must avoid simplistic solutions that see compassionate pedagogy as the flavour-of-the-month answer to deep-rooted systemic problems and harms caused by decades of neoliberal higher education policy. 

Second, we have to resist commodifying compassion at an institutional level. Although metrics and measurement have a role in rigorous research, creation of a compassion excellence framework, or something similar, should also be avoided. Compassionate pedagogy must be authentic, and it is for staff and students to tell us when we are getting it right, when we are getting it wrong, and where the compassion gaps can be found. Compassion requires courage – including the courage to hear and act on the hard truths of higher education.

Finally, we need to beware of the backlash that is beginning to emerge in some quarters – one that sees compassionate pedagogy as an emotionally manipulative and censorious practice antithetical to education. Instead, we need to examine our own assumptions to shed light on what we think we know about our students and their ability to learn and grow in our pedagogic spaces. There is also the benefit of reciprocal compassionate behaviour within universities, with numerous studies showing that both giving and receiving compassion is associated with positive outcomes. In other words, a win-win for staff and student health and well-being.

How and what students learn in compassionate higher education cultures and communities will equip them well for their own futures, as well as the future of humanity. This requires courage, radical reform, hope without illusion and hope that is anchored in compassionate pedagogical practices and compassionate leadership. 

Kathryn Waddington is emerita fellow in psychology and Bryan Bonaparte is senior lecturer in psychology, both at the University of Westminster.

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