War, Displacement, and Kindness

• In Event: Storying Educational Possibilities: Humanizing Teaching and Learning

Abstract

“Kindness is a behavior driven by the feeling of compassion” (Long, 1997, p. 243), and to a little girl whose life was dictated and devastated by war, migration, interrupted schooling and otherness, kindness became a lifeboat. I attended nine schools in five different countries by the time I was 18 years old. War in Lebanon was the primary reason for the many moves in my earlier years, back and forth between Lebanon, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, India and the US. I have always been different from everyone around me: my name is the first dead giveaway, followed by my elusive accent, my lack of fluency in the languages surrounding me, my different culture, my different holidays, among many other differences. In essence, I embodied “otherness.”
Throughout my quite chaotic and “othered” educational journey, I felt moments of acute shame, behind-ness, confusion, fear, loss, not being enough and untethered-ness. But I made it through all the trauma and change because of my teachers, the few, who – whether or not they knew what I was carrying within me – shined their light on me, bringing me out of my confused clouds with their kindness and patience. As Rowland (2009) explains, a framework of kindness in teaching works because it “rests in the fact that both kindly acts and pedagogical acts require the actor to identify with the concerns of the other” (p. 208).
My past learning experiences led me to a teaching philosophy that emphasizes kindness as a pedagogical framing and humanizes my teaching. As a community college professor, I teach with openness, a solid organizational structure that is flexible as needed, a genuine air of mutual respect, understanding, patience and most of all, kindness with the ultimate goal of contributing to my students’ growth as confident and independent learners. I make time for my students, give them warm words of motivation, validate their concerns, check in with them outside of the classroom and do many other things that contribute to their sense of belonging in their foreign environments. Just as my teachers did for me. It worked for me; and my 20 years of teaching experience shows me that this works with my students, particularly my ESL students.
With the objective of creating a space for session participants to do their own archeological dives - with their own narratives comprising the “data” – this session will engage participants in a dialectal storytelling mode of inquiry that allows them to (1) listen to the stories of other people; (2) reflect on their own educational journeys; (3) translate their experiences into their own teaching today; (4) and consider how they might reimagine their teaching within a framework of kindness. And particularly so at a time when the world is trending toward nationalism, rejection of immigrants, and influx of refugees. With victims of war and displacement, kindness can serve as that first bastion of hope.

Author

• Talar Kaloustian, Community College of Philadelphia