Political Science Educator: volume 28, issue 2
Reviews
A Pedagogy of Kindness. By Catherine J. Denial. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2024. 151p. $24.95 paper.
Review by Matt Evans (mevans8@nwacc.edu)
Catherine J. Denial’s book functions well as both practical advice and as a manifesto—diagnosing the smaller and larger problems of teaching in higher education and offering corrective techniques. Her suggestions work at the level of classroom conduct and planning a class, as well as the broader institution of the culture of the school itself.
This might feel like we should simply be nicer or have more grace. Kindness, instead, is a “discipline, practice, and journey” (12). It is a craft directed inward towards our own mental dispositions, and outwards to our practices and our institutions. Denial, as such, points us to the limits and possibilities of our bodies as teachers and learners. She tell us that faculty must: a) move inwards in self-reflection as we cannot be good teachers without examining our own privileges, histories, assumptions of others, and positions on politics; b) engage in self-care to make current practices sustainable to our future selves; c) establish boundaries to make ourselves and other accountable to our own limits; d) inquire into the world with humility that our knowledge and abilities are limited; e) acknowledge and actively sustain support networks of people that make our work possible. This praxis brings us to what Denial believes is the point of pedagogy—to treat students as collaborators in producing knowledge and learning with nuance and deep insights to add to the class and how it is conducted (though not in the same way that open pedagogy[1] has students create test banks and other teaching aids for future students as part of the learning process). It requires taking time off from answering emails—and even our deeper forms of working—for meals and other non-vocational activities that helps sustain our humanity. It requires building catch-up days into our syllabus. It requires building kindness into our syllabus and our assessments. For the syllabus, this means addressing questions of what the audience is, how the course addresses issues of justice, and whether time has been properly planned for faculty and student in the class. For the assessment, some of the measures she discusses include addressing the hidden curriculum (of the unstated assumptions and skills that make some students with different backgrounds and knowledges more successful), engaging in “ungrading” (that decenters the grading process and gives students agency over their grade through self-assessment), confronting ableism (of how students may have different talents that are rewarded unfairly throughout the class), and cancelling class to have individual meetings with students.
While much of the book proves its value time and again, I see one minor problem at the core of the project. The title and the rest of the text suggest that we can talk about a single horizon of kindness, but that does not seem quite right. Different theoretical approaches overlap, but at times they conflict. It’s not always productive to rectify those conflicts. At times, tension and difference can be highly productive. Her discussion of mutual aid proves interesting, as a type of agency within the bureaucracy for faculty and staff to respond to immediate needs of the community without exhausting bureaucratic restraint. But does that not commit us to broader systematic claims within the Pytor Kropotkin/David Graeber-inspired anarchist approach to politics and pedagogy? Does this force us to attend to the need for voluntary association and equal agency of all (that seemingly contradicts some of the knowledge dynamic of teaching and the broader classroom order)? Can we use these approaches without that commitment?
More importantly, is there a series of overlapping horizons of how kindness becomes actualized in different communities of practice that should be acknowledged and not flattened in a singular pedagogy? How can we keep these kinds of kindness cultivated, composed, and respected? Could we take something from Geeta Chowdhry’s usage of Edward Said’s employment of the contrapuntal from Theodore Adorno[2] — the way that discordant sounds mirror different and incommensurate narratives and experiences that gets beyond tiresome binaries? Would it build on how Denial defines a kyriarchy, interlocking systems of oppression that students face, to explain where we find students? Maybe. Though, I wish Denial had another 100 pages to explore these issues. Of course, perhaps that’s me man-splaining how to write a book or offering a book that I would have written. This brief and thoughtful books adds so much in our individual and collective horizons.
Endnotes
[1] https://openpedagogy.org/
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/03058298070360010701
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Matt Evans is Professor of Political Science and Service Learning Coordinator at Northwest Arkansas Community College, and he serves as co-editor of the Political Science Educator.
