"Leading With Our Hearts": Understanding Efforts to Make Education More Human Through the Lens of Compassion Organizing

• In Event: Conceptualizing Efforts to Bring About More Humanizing Educational Institutions: Perspectives From Research + Practice

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
In this paper, we draw on compassion organizing (Dutton et al., 2005) from management sciences to explore conditions surrounding the coordination and institutionalizing of compassionate practices within one large, state-funded afterschool system whose leadership had adopted a cultural change effort focused on compassionate leadership. The study draws on ethnographic data collected as part of a multi-year study and partnership with the branch of the state department that oversees all publicly funded afterschool programs and sites.
Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
Compassion organizing (Dutton et al., 2006) is the process through which institutional actors notice, feel, and respond in coordinated ways to the pain and suffering of its members. Organizational values, routines, and practices can allow for the centering of human emotion and the recognition of members’ humanity as critically part of who they are at work (Frost et al. 2006). Through compassion organizing, practices that center human emotion can become coordinated to attend to human suffering, and institutionalized through the use of materials, resources, and creation of new roles and infrastructure that support actor needs. Institutional conditions that foster the noticing of human suffering and the enabling of compassionate action in workplace settings include norms that value honest sharing of personal well-being and humanity, opportunities for rich forms of interaction, high-quality relationships, and strong leadership (Lilius et al. 2011). However, pressures surrounding productivity and efficiency can often “obscure” and “drive out” human moments in organizations (Lilius et al., 2013, p.3).
Methods and data
Given that compassion organizing is evidenced through both organizational structures and discursive practices, our data collection prioritized contexts in which participants across the state afterschool system provided narratives of their workplace experiences. Data included interviews with each stakeholder, participant observations from trainings provided to site-level staff, and system artifacts (including tools used to guide workplace practice). Our analysis focused on (1) how and when compassionate practices become coordinated in the education system; and (2) what conditions seemed to drive out human moments and responses to need.
Results/Conclusions
Our findings suggest that enacting compassionate practices requires engagement with and restoration of historically “toxic” relationships and distrust in education systems. Guiding frameworks, tools for interpersonal work, and strong leadership that “embodies” love were important resources for system actors as they made decisions about their practice and enacted compassionate approaches in their work. Creating new networks and designated roles to attend to previous disconnection between sites and the state department were also key in coordinating change. However, competing local agendas and pressures associated with funding and district priorities served to overwhelm and drive out opportunities for human connection and compassionate action.
Scholarly Significance
This analysis suggests one way of conceptualizing systems change toward more compassionate approaches and surfaces familiar challenges to bringing about sustained, equitable change in education.

Authors

• Carrie D. Allen, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Patrik Lundh, SRI International
  Non-Presenting Author