Compassionate Pedagogy - A Westminster Learning Community
What is compassionate pedagogy and why is it important? Compassionate
pedagogy is about ensuring that our teaching and interactions with students and
colleagues are based on kindness and are followed through by actions and practices
that alleviate suffering and promote wellbeing. It is important because it allows
students, teachers and all involved in universities to become a humanising voice
which listens to and hears the realities of all students, including marginalised and
minoritized groups. It begins with self-compassion and kindness, and extends to
compassionate values, relationships, university systems and culture.
What is our purpose? The purpose of this community is twofold: (i) to co-create with
students best practice guidelines and tools to support the development of
compassionate pedagogical practices; and (ii) to promote the scholarship of
compassionate pedagogy through academic-practitioner collaboration and
publication.
What have we achieved so far?
• A Special Issue on Compassionate Pedagogy in the Journal of Perspectives
in Applied Academic Practice (Dec, 2018):
https://jpaap.napier.ac.uk/index.php/JPAAP/issue/view/23
• A ‘Reverse’ mentoring project: A knowledge sharing study between BME
psychology students and senior university leaders, which will be presented at
the Advance HE Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Conference in 2021 – Bryan
Bonaparte, Deborah Husbands, Kathryn Waddington
• A book: Towards the compassionate university: From golden thread to global
impact, which will be published by Routledge in 2021, and includes chapters
by – Justin Haroun, Yusuf Kaplan, Lisa Matthewman, Jenni Nowlan, Frands
Pedersen. Kathryn Waddington (editor).
• A Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) research grant for a
project: Developing compassionate pedagogical practice with students as coresearchers: A focused
What next? If you would like to know more please get in touch with the co-chairs:
Kathryn Waddington: k.waddington@westminster.ac.uk and Bryan Bonaparte:
b.bonaparte1@westminster.ac.uk
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