Musings from the cold

Katrina just didn’t get it. To be quite honest, I don’t think a lot of us got it, but Mrs Jeffries had Katrina in her sights.

“Do you know what a stunned mullet looks like Katrina?”

“No, Mrs Jeffries” Katrina said quietly.

“Go and have a look in the mirror”.

Mrs Jeffies was unkind. It seemed to my 14 year-old self that she was deliberately unkind. That she knew she was being unkind, and made a decision to say that hurtful thing anyway. Katrina was a studious girl, who rarely spoke in class. She was not ever a trouble maker, she didn’t answer back, was never sent out of class, didn’t have things like “could do better” written on her school reports. She was a ‘good’ girl.

Yet, still, Mrs Jeffries was unkind. I wonder if she’s reflected on that moment since. Does she even remember it, as I do, almost 50 years later? It’s quite possibly a question I will never know the answer to.

I think back over my own teaching career and wonder if I was ever deliberately unkind. Did I say things to my students as hurtful as Mrs Jeffries had said? That’s a question I don’t think I want to know the answer to.

Saying mean things, being as deliberately unkind as that maths teacher was all those years ago, is one way of being unkind. But there are plenty of other ways. And I’m sure I was unkind in my teaching in ways that went beyond saying hurtful things to students.

An example springs immediately to mind: I asked Rochelle and Louise to leave class one day when they admitted they hadn’t prepared for it. They were in their final year of university, about to head into the world of teaching, and in that moment I felt it was disrespectful and unprofessional to come to class unprepared. The other students in the class thought me unkind. In fact, they didn’t just think it, they told me.

I scour my bookshelves and see the familiar titles. Titles such as The students are watching, Teaching toward freedom, Happiness and education, The challenge to care in school, The schools our children deserve, 12 characteristics of effective teachers and I think about the ethical and moral issues underpinning teaching. And I think about kindness.

What is kindness in teaching? How is it enacted? Is kindness the same as being nice? Or soft? Or caring? Is kindness possible within institutions that are unkind, that have unkind structures and unkind policies? Can an individual teacher’s kindness ameliorate unkind policies, processes and systems?

These are questions my colleague Dr Airdre Grant and I explore in our forthcoming book, Enacting a pedagogy of kindness: A guide for practitioners in higher education, to be published by Routledge next year. We have invited contributions from academic leaders, those involved in curriculum design, learning design, assessment, and teaching. How do those working in higher ed enact kindness in their teaching, in the way they design assessments, in the ways they lead their institution, in curriculum design, in the ways they work with colleagues?

One contributor writes that:

I always thought I would be kind. The brutal editing on my first publication had been so confronting that I determined to hold to the memory of this experience … I would never forget how even the kindest criticism can shatter an author’s confidence.

Despite this I still upset many students. It seemed to be part of the job description.

Another writes that building trust in the classroom is an act of kindness:

Through simple, yet intentional, acts of humanizing my students, such as learning what makes them unique or being interested in what is going on in their lives outside of our class, my students learn not only to trust me but also to trust each other. 

As we saw, Mrs Jeffries was unkind, but unkindness in teaching can come in many forms, one of which is deficit thinking. In one chapter, the authors write that:

Coddling is a form of deficit thinking that sustains the belief that non-white students are inherently less capable or have less potential than their white peers (Foster, 1998). White teachers may engage in coddling behaviour when they lower their expectations of non-white students and shield them from challenges that they perceive as being too difficult.

This is true of other marginalised groups as well, as I found during my time as a secondary school teacher. The low-socioeconomic suburb in which the school was situated, was characterised by inter-generational un/under-employment, domestic violence, drug abuse, and poor schooling outcomes, all of which had an impact on the students and the ways teachers thought about them, and subsequently taught them. These were ‘poor’ kids, whose ‘mothers had children to multiple fathers’; kids who had ‘little to look forward to’; kids who ‘would turn out to be the same kind of no-hoper their parents and grandparents were’. Often they were children who were abused and neglected, who came to school hungry and tired.

These children had one thing else in common … teachers who judged them. Teachers who were unkind. Teachers who told them there was no point in studying “academic” subjects because they wouldn’t be capable, and really, why would they bother when they weren’t going to use academic skills anyway. These were students whose teachers had low expectations of them, who thought of them as what they didn’t have rather than what they did. It’s a different form of coddling … but it’s still ultimately unkind.

To begin to think differently as a teacher requires a shift in attitude. Kindness is a deliberate action, which is not without challenge, as one contributor writes:

I have found kindness requires a delicate balance of compassion and courage, a balance that is near impossible to predetermine as it’s affected by so many variables. Assessment design, underpinned by a compassionate outlook, can help by engineering moments of human connection. Attending class then, becomes not simply about passing the assessment but can lead to the development of a sense of community, built around assessment as a shared experience. 

Kindness can also be used deliberately to underpin institutional teaching frameworks which then informs practice, as one contributor notes:

Between mid 2019 and early 2020, we planned and implemented a whole-of-institution process of reflection, discussion, and critique aimed at identifying and codifying the values, dispositions, and practices that best captured what was at the core of our teaching approach. This process relied upon several assumptions … the first of which was that we should start with students. I felt that student voice would serve to unify our purpose and give our staff something concrete to engage with. Through focus groups and surveys, all students had the opportunity to tell us what makes a great teacher, and to identify the things that were important to them as learners. Synthesising their responses provided a series of ‘provocations’ that teachers were then invited to respond to – statements such as “a great teacher knows what I want, and what I am afraid of”, and “a great teacher makes me feel safe to be myself”. 

I didn’t ever intend to be unkind in my teaching, but I don’t know that I ever explicitly thought about kindness either, despite the books on my shelves about caring, happiness, and the ethical and moral issues underpinning teaching. It’s like Cate Denial said, “kindness is something most of us aspire toward as people, but not something we necessarily think of as central to teaching” (Denial, 2019, para. 6).

If you’re a teacher, in what ways do you enact kindness in your practic, in your day-to-day interactions with students , in the ways you talk about (and think about) students, in your assessment practice, in the ways you make desisions about what to teach the students in front of you now (as opposed to what you taught the Grade 3s, or 9s, or second year university students last year/term/decade)? And just as importantly, in what ways are you kind to yourself?

Cate Denial says that “kindness is a discipline, not a feeling”.

I imagine I’d have remembered more about the maths in my Grade 9 maths class if Mrs Jeffries had had the discipline to be kind … instead, all I can remember is the unkind.

What will your students remember?