Developing pedagogies of compassion: policy, principles, and practice

This article focuses on what might be called the ‘compassion turn’ in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), evolving as an antidote to the damaging effects of over four decades of toxic, neoliberal higher education (HE) policy (Pedersen, 2021; Smyth, 2017). Work by Gibbs (2017) and Waddington (2021) led to the recent edited collection: Developing pedagogies of compassion in Higher Education: a practice first approach (Waddington and Bonaparte, 2024), which addresses intersections and gaps between practice, theory, and research that both connect and divide compassion and pedagogies. This article presents an overview of core themes that need to be woven into a new HE policy narrative, and principles of a ‘practice first’ approach that will enable pedagogies of compassion to develop and flourish. It offers a significant contribution to understanding the need for compassion in twenty-first century universities, while simultaneously understanding the harsh HE landscape, and the need to disrupt this in ways that Killam (2023, p. 35) suggests:

"Offering compassion as a throughline of inquiry, I wonder if/how it is possible for compassion to disrupt neoliberalism through the precarity of individual and systemic enaction. … Can/does compassion create breeches [sic] for new possibilities?"