Proposal Title
Geographies of kindness: Understanding and mapping the borders of pedagogical kindness
Session Type
Presentation
Room
Somerville House, room 3315
Start Date
14-7-2023 12:00 PM
End Date
14-7-2023 12:20 PM
Keywords
Culture of Care; Pedagogy of Kindness; Academic Resiliency; Workload; Teaching Tensions
Primary Threads
Curriculum
Abstract
The pedagogy of kindness and culture of care models of teaching in STEM have been well described for a number of years. However, while there was an initial interest in adoption of these forms of pedagogy during the early part of the shift to remote teaching, they have not been sustained. This pilot study examined the departmental ("geographical") distribution of these teaching practices at the University of Toronto, whether they spread locally within the unit, and what the barriers to this spread were. Student comments from online sources (RMP, Reddit etc) were used to examine these geographies and the impact on the wider unit. Initial results show that only isolated pockets within units exist and no STEM departments were found to have universal implementation of these polices. Follow-up interviews within various STEM units identified 5 barriers to adoption and suggestions that overcoming these barriers will present institutional challenges.
Elements of Engagement
Online annotations and chats and polls will be used throughout.
As this is more of a discussion based sharing of pilot data I was not sure what the best mode of sharing would be, and happy to be considered for alternative session types
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Geographies of kindness: Understanding and mapping the borders of pedagogical kindness
Somerville House, room 3315
The pedagogy of kindness and culture of care models of teaching in STEM have been well described for a number of years. However, while there was an initial interest in adoption of these forms of pedagogy during the early part of the shift to remote teaching, they have not been sustained. This pilot study examined the departmental ("geographical") distribution of these teaching practices at the University of Toronto, whether they spread locally within the unit, and what the barriers to this spread were. Student comments from online sources (RMP, Reddit etc) were used to examine these geographies and the impact on the wider unit. Initial results show that only isolated pockets within units exist and no STEM departments were found to have universal implementation of these polices. Follow-up interviews within various STEM units identified 5 barriers to adoption and suggestions that overcoming these barriers will present institutional challenges.