Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World: Enacting a Pedagogy of Compassion in Teacher Education

• In Event: Social justice, compassion and inclusion in teacher education and professional development

Proposal

Education for global citizenship should help young people develop core competencies that allow them to actively engage with the world, and help to make it a more just and sustainable place. It is a form of civic learning that involves students’ active participation in projects that address global issues of a social, political, economic, or environmental nature. Pedagogy of Compassion, which seeks to dismantle polarized thinking and question ingrained beliefs, to change mind-sets and instil hope and peace, offers one way of doing this. (Author 1 2021, 204).

Contemporary youth-led movements toward justice underscore the urgency of teacher-preparation programs in familiarizing pre-service teachers in the U.S. and globally with pedagogies that talk back to polarizing anti-Black, anti-immigrant, and adult-centric discourses. We examined a pedagogy of compassion (Vandeyar, 2013; Vandeyar & Swart, 2016, 2019) as one such decolonial approach in our collaborative research, teaching, and teacher-education partnership across universities in the U.S. Midwest and South Africa. The purpose of this study was to explore how PSTs specialising in English teaching in the U.S. and South Africa identified challenges, opportunities, and connections while designing curriculum and teaching approaches that utilize decolonial frameworks, such as a pedagogy of compassion, to transform education contexts. It specifically addressed how a pedagogy of compassion can be utilised in teacher education and K–12 teaching to help teachers and students create inclusive and compassionate spaces and dispositions, and how to sustain the joy, passion and enthusiasm of English teaching.

Strong et al. (2022) asserted possibilities for comparative education research and teaching that seeks to question and disrupt histories of state-sanctioned violence, and racial capitalist and anti-Black practices, research, and policies globally that “sustain structural and material inequalities in schools and society” (S3). The authors engaged principles of the Black Lives Matter movement in envisioning the humanity and “abolitionist horizons” of Black youth and communities across global contexts and educational futures (S3). We view such envisaging in our inquiry – designing curriculum and teaching toward justice, and envisioning futures – as an enacting of Matias and Liou’s (2015) call to engage PSTs in “revising the curriculum to strategically unveil how racism is embedded in standardized curriculum” (611). Ball (2000), in a comparative teacher-education inquiry of teacher development across the US and South Africa, found that teachers of culturally and linguistically diverse youth who participated in both discussions of literacy and activities enacting literacy theories developed reflective perspectives and commitments to teaching, different than teachers solely engaging in teacher-education practices focused on talk (see also Ball, 2006). Matias and Liou (2015) described such lesson planning as “fundamental” (611) toward what we think of as teaching and teacher education as the ongoing work of educational justice.

Social constructivism and a qualitative bounded case study provided the metatheoretical and methodological paradigms of this study. Data capture comprised identified research literature and popular-press articles that discussed decolonial approaches, with an intentional emphasis on PSTs reading research literature describing a pedagogy of compassion, and then discussing challenges, opportunities, and connections as they designed curriculum and teaching using the lens. We examined PSTs’ work generated in a secondary English methods course in the U.S. and South Africa. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 PSTs (10 in the U.S. and 10 in South Africa). Data were analysed by means of the content analysis method.

We discuss three findings of our qualitative analysis of how pre-service teachers in the U.S. and South Africa identified challenges, opportunities, and connections as they designed English curriculum and teaching utilizing the theoretical framework pedagogy of compassion. We thus conceptualize a pedagogy of compassion in teacher education involving three stances: centering experiences and identities of students; naming and contextualizing joy as key to learning and community; and demonstrating compassion through expressions of care. We assert the scholarly significance of a pedagogy of compassion in teacher education to support PSTs in designing curriculum and teaching toward more just futures.

Our examination making visible PSTs’ understandings of and challenges in enacting a pedagogy of compassion in South Africa and the US provide needed insights and comparative approaches for teacher educators and educational researchers seeking to engage the ongoing work of transforming education contexts toward more just futures and re-imagining new possibilities for what education, and the world, may yet become.

Authors

• Saloshna Vandeyar, University of Pretoria

• Thirusellvan Vandeyar, University of Pretoria