LTC Salon | Pedagogy of Kindness with Visiting Scholar Wajeehah Aayesha

Julie Russo is the 2023-2024 Learning and Teaching Commons Faculty Scholar. Her salon series provides an informal space for faculty discussion of teaching practices and challenges. See her complete bio on our website.

Dear colleagues, 

This week you have a very special opportunity to join me in talking with LTC Visiting Scholar Wajeehah Aayeshah. Wajeehah is a Lecturer in Curriculum Design at the Arts Teaching Innovation (ATI), University of Melbourne. Her research explores designing pedagogical spaces that are inclusive, safe, and brave. Her current project on ‘kindness in higher education’ explores how the concept of kindness can encompass practices of collaboration, joy, justice, and equity in academic settings. She also collaborates with artists and game designers to produce creative narratives.

Salon doors are open 1:15-2:45pm on Wednesday 1/31 – come when you can and leave when you need! Find us at the Learning and Teaching Commons (Sem II E3120) with tea and snacks, excited to engage with your questions and ideas. 

You can also join us via Zoom (the OWL will be set up): https://evergreen.zoom.us/j/6517459991 

For more on the Pedagogy of Kindness, you can read the attached article for background, or this much shorter piece:

Denial, C. 2019. A Pedagogy of Kindness. https://hybridpedagogy.org/pedagogy-of-kindness

Wajeehah writes: My project explores the practice of kindness in education. It focuses on how kindness is embedded in everyday life in higher education institutions. By actively listening to experiences and observing academics, staff members, and students, I am trying to develop a framework of kindness.

Education fundamentally should be kind, compassionate, and inspiring. However, academic institutions are increasingly being recognised as the site of inequitable power hierarchies based on gendered, racial, and colonial grounds (Lokot 2022). The difference between Global North and Global South is wide but the dire consequences of inequalities exist all around the world.

In this Salon, we can explore and develop our understanding of the shape of kindness in educational settings. You will be invited to reflect on your experiences and practices of kindness. This reflection can contribute to a discussion about pragmatically embedding kindness in everyday educational life. For this, we are going to use a ‘framework of kindness’. In the framework of kindness, ‘decolonised restorative practice’ needs to be implemented in the whole academic eco-system.