Catherine Denial’s “A Pedagogy of Kindness”
The classroom and instructors play a vital role in shaping our identities as students and how we continue to progress in our education, our perspectives on classroom learning and involvement, and also how we approach guidance from our instructors to benefit our educational pursuits or talents.
Being able to step away and reevaluate ones teaching strategies and perspective of their classroom allows the advantage to realize that one’s approach to teaching and to creating a feeling of community and not one of just a classroom where we are there to get a good grade by any means. These circumstances need to be realized and effective actions to creating mindful circumstances of unity where students want to share, collaborate, feel connected. An equal balance from student participation and even more so on instructors to reflect each day on their course structure or overlooking control that may not be beneficial to a learning environment or producing beneficial feedback and student progress.
Without the most important elements of Trust and Kindness resonating into the classroom there will be limited foundational components to create a classroom where students can learn and also grow with their instructors guidance not feeling an awkwardness of misunderstanding. Kindness to me as an active middle aged Graduate student involves values we all bring to the classroom and how we evolve with each other’s ambitions to learning in finding the best collaborative ways to do so with applying the course content and openly eliminating those barriers introduced such as sub-textual messages, instructors being in unproductive overshadowing position of continued absolute authority, or students being labeled as passive novices with no valuable input to contribute to their own learning environments that needs mindfulness to change. By including students in their assessment and grading we can build the trust needed to foster the type of kindness mentioned in this article and a classroom were collaboration and understanding prevail as a equation to trusting each other with empowerment in our sails.
Marisol Brito, et al’s “Love in the Time of Peer Review”
Education as an act of empowerment and a way to express love for each other’s desire to invest in ourselves and to teach each other how to become more mindful of our abilities to make change starting in the classroom. Love is needed first to better understand this journey that each member of the classroom vulnerably partakes in during their academic studies as a student and then as an instructor. When we decide to push past the boundaries collaboratively of academic norms, we experience that love that embellishes our thoughts and feeling of oneness. Such process of peer review has the potential to empower such kinds of love were everyone’s voice is heard and contributes their own experience to the group. This could happen simultaneously and effectively reshape how we evolve in our roles as students, educators were we become members of a mindful collective filled with vulnerable interactions and sharing with peer review opportunities.
By having a human connection that provides a foundation for openness and feedback with peer review the writer, editor roles blend together of a mindful participation with a humane blissfulness that collaborative completion creates.. The environment we create becomes one that is sincere, empathetic to our learning and how we move forward after transactions of empowering conversation that fills the voids of our belonging. A new wave of ethical pedagogy has to be rooted in sincerity and common bonding of understanding of peer and reviewer and what each will get out of the process in terms of strengthening relationships and humanizing each other’s efforts through words and the actions that bring us to each other as an opportunity for growth and greater mindfulness of pedagogical peer review discussions.
Asao B. Inoue’s “Assessing so That People Stop Killing Each Other”
Educational language and discourse literacy will have to be redirected and acknowledge the need for a transfer of power from harmful standards of student labor that remain negated of the need to recognize who are effected by the permeation of oppression starting in the classroom into the world that is in essence killing one another. There needs to be an observance of change in how the labors of students are seen or experienced on an equal platform. This needs to happen now and not stunted by previous ways of thinking in the classroom or sweeping under the rug mentality of the responsibility to whom it will be, diversity ruling in and breaking through laxed efforts of common literacy. Language can be used as effectively as a mechanized weapon of slow destruction if its gears remain greased with white habitus rankings.
We can make changes with a new pedagogy towards the frailness of our human conditioning and making necessary changes that are embedded in our learning. A classroom were everyone can flourish and nourish; one were each presence has value as the ideas represent behind a labor based grading contract encompassing all abilities and effort. I feel the statements in the article made about recognizing our pedagogies materials of learning are vital to the type of perspective and language we need to make change towards compassion and one’s presence as equal as ourselves granting them the equal acknowledgment of their labors by listening and then making adjustments towards better human conditions. In the presence of a student we need to find better ways of limiting expectations that limit our ability to be present in the moment experiencing each others perception of growth ecology.
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