Love, Care and Belonging in HE

It is a strange sensation to have discussions about love, care and belonging through a screen. Particularly when there are issues with bandwidth which means you cannot see the faces of the other people in the cohort or hear them unless they are speaking and unmute their mics. In my own context as both teacher and student I often think about how this affects the engagement and learning of my students. Of course, I have my camera on all the time while I am teaching, but in the context of creating a sense of care and belonging between students in a classroom as well as between student and teacher I think this can be one of the downsides to online learning. It is difficult to create a sense of community and care between students when we range in career stages, ages, races, political opinions etc. Aside from the shared experience of taking the PgCert together there is not much else I have in common with many of my colleagues within the cohort. In that sense, how do you foster inter-student empathy with all of these positional barriers plus the added strain of teaching through a screen? As I have said, this is something I am wrestling with both within my teaching and learning practices.

“Belonging is intersectional and ultimately, perhaps (you may not agree) individual. We may ‘belong’ to groups, by virtue of our race, gender, academic discipline, academia in general, but this does not mean that we speak as one and can speak for each other. There is a radical individuality in the nature of human experience. This applies for our students as well. It makes little sense to speak of the student experience as something singular. Experience is something that an individual goes through.”

Lindsay Jordan (2020) Lecture notes on Love and Belonging in the Educational Realm.

The excerpt above, taken from Lindsay Jordan’s lecture notes on Love and Belonging in the Educational Realm, focusses a lot on the work of Anna Julia Cooper and how her positionality affected her personal and teaching philosophies. Despite Jordan noting that many of Cooper’s philosophies – namely her brand of feminism – were “Victorian” in their approach, they still hold a lot of resonance with the kinds of teaching methods practiced today. Certainly the way I was taught throughout my scholastic and university careers felt little different from the Victorian methods depicted in film and TV. It seems evident to me that although on the surface a lot of changes have been made to teaching, both politically and technologically (our ability to hold this session online is a case in point), in terms of our human ability to care and our inner worlds as teachers and students, we are still fairly Victorian. This makes sense, if Dunbar’s number is to be believed, on average human beings are only able to ‘retain’ around 150 contacts at one time. The homo sapien brain has barely evolved since our hunter-gatherer days, raising interesting implications for the politics of care within a digital society and within a learning environment. In the context of teaching, learning and care in an online space, the constant digital bombardment and demand for interaction across platforms may be responsible for students and teachers having to make extra effort to care about one another. (Levtin 2015)

“According to the theory, the tightest circle has just five people – loved ones. That’s followed by successive layers of 15 (good friends), 50 (friends), 150 (meaningful contacts), 500 (acquaintances) and 1500 (people you can recognise). People migrate in and out of these layers, but the idea is that space has to be carved out for any new entrants.”

Christine Ro (2019) Dunbar’s Number: Why We Can Only Maintain 150 Relationships BBC.com.

The reference to “carving out” space to care about new people is interesting in this context. As teachers we likely carve out new space in our brains which allows us to care for our students, however I wonder if our students do this for one another? Perhaps this is why cliques form quite early on within new university cohorts and stay relatively consistent over the duration of the course? The process and pressures of carving out new space in the brain for what students are learning likely leaves little room for caring for their entire cohort. This is disappointing for us as educators, because we want students to learn from one another as well as from us. Conversely, perhaps the pressure from tutors to engage with one another is what causes the lack of engagement, it feels like a task rather than a natural occurrence and therefore takes up brain space as an obligation rather than as a desirable social interaction.

Thinking about care and belonging in this context, the general format of seminars and ‘participating’ in classrooms or seminars tends to privilege those who are extroverted or ambiverted over those who are introverted. Padlets and Mentimeters can go some ways into remedying this issue – they can be anonymised and allow students more time to think about their answers before writing them. However, in a question and answer/call and response format – with a teacher asking a question and waiting expectantly with a half smile in a silence which becomes increasingly more uncomfortable – it is usually the extroverted students who get fed up of the silence and tension first and answer. Which leads to the same 5 people dominating the discussion, leaving out the rest who perhaps need more time to warm up. This is even more apparent in a digital teaching environment, when visual cues are lost due to cameras being off and mics being muted. How then can a teacher create a sense of belonging and care in such an environment without ostensibly picking on, and possibly further alienating, a student who may be engaged in the content of the session but who is very introverted?

Further to this point is the issue of safety, cultural literacy and love languages. In his 1992 book The Five Love Languages Gary Chapman suggests that there are 5 general ways that human beings express and experience love in their intimate romantic relationships. These are:

• Words of affirmation
• Quality time
• Receiving/ giving gifts
• Acts of service
• Physical touch

Whilst I am by no means suggesting that educators care romantically for their students in this manner, I think it is possible to use this theory to create a tailored caring environment for students which helps them to feel safe and as if they belong. I think this is especially relevant when paired with the concept of cultural literacy for students from overseas or from diasporic communities. Something as basic as researching and making an effort to understand the teaching methods and cultures of the home countries our overseas students hail from can make a massive difference to how we tailor our teaching approaches, but also in our responses to their behaviour. For example, the majority of the cohort in the course I teach on is Chinese. Before I began teaching, my course leader took me aside and gave me some tips of cultural literacy I should be aware of, which helped me to understand my students better and allowed me to tailor my approach to care for their needs in a classroom environment. In their response piece to the question “Why Asian Students Are So Quiet?” for Shades of Noir Yifan He writes:

I smiled through the crit today because I don’t know when I should jump into the discussion. 

I don’t want to cut people short. 

I did try to talk at some point but was interrupted before I finished the first word because they did not hear me. 

I guess I will never be loud enough to catch their attention.

But I hope that they took away from my awkward smile that I was not indifferent to their work.

Yifan He, response to the question “Why Asian Students Are So Quiet?”

The assumption by many western teachers is that Asian students are all introverted and shy. I disagree with this assumption and actually believe it to be racist. Like many issues in the teaching and learning sphere, the question of why East Asian students may be more quiet than western students in class is layered and situation dependent. In Yifan’s case, they did not feel safe to speak in that particular crit environment and therefore they said nothing. Students feeling safe to express themselves and get things “wrong” is a huge part of their ability to participate in class discussions that I think Western tutors often take for granted. Our teaching culture fosters this approach and we assume this methodology is ubiquitous due to the arrogance of settler colonialist thinking.

Considering this issue in terms of love languages may provide an answer, it is possible that overseas students are showing they are attentive, respectful and care about what we are saying by being quiet. When I asked some of my students why they were quiet in class (despite me asking them questions and trying to engage with them that way), some of them said that they didn’t feel they had anything to contribute at that time or felt they needed more time and space than I gave them to think about what was being discussed and feed back. Some said they did not want to embarrass themselves by saying ‘the wrong thing’ in front of their classmates. A few said that they weren’t sure how to say what they wanted to express in English and so said nothing. Most of them said that at one point or another their internet connection had dropped out and they had missed some of the conversation, and they felt uncomfortable interrupting me to ask what they had missed. They explained that in China it would be highly disrespectful to interrupt a teacher for this reason. Some apologised and said nothing more, which I recognised as a failure on my part to make them feel safe enough to speak.

After this conversation, I experimented with my teaching methods and used Padlet to try to make it easier – and feel safer – for my students to participate in our tutorials in different ways. With all this in mind, I think more can be done by the university to provide lecturers who teach on courses with large cohorts of overseas students with lessons on cultural competency. Specifically, providing information on the learning culture of the countries the overseas students come from so that we can think more critically about our teaching practices and how they could be seen by students from different cultures. Aside from this, overseas students who have gone back to their home countries in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic may be experiencing difficulties with their internet connections. Many of my students have said that they cannot access Moodle in China without a VPN, however VPNs are illegal in China. Another barrier to learning that Western teachers will overlook due to privilege. It could be useful for us to consider recording our tutorials more often so that students who miss out sections of the seminar/tutorial due to bad connections can watch back in their own time. In this way, we could meet students where they are and probably create a sense of belonging and care using new teaching languages which better facilitate learning.

In the session notes written by Lindsay she notes that teachers are sensitive to many things, our students, our own standards and the external expectations of course directors and university management as a whole. In this section on the pressure teachers experience, she quotes Cooper ‘there is no time to inwardly digest… she gives herself no joy in the act and loses entirely all sense of humour in the process.’ Thinking about what I have written above in relation to this, I think that the internal, external and digital pressures of care can sometimes build to a boiling point in tutors and contribute to ‘compassion fatigue’. Typically a phenomenon that is usually seen in people with medical caring responsibilities, compassion fatigue is exemplified by decreased empathy for the physical or emotional pain of others due to mental and physical exhaustion and overwhelm. Psychologists are reporting that the consistent bombardment we receive online via social media and news outlets is contributing to a more generalised version of compassion fatigue (Carter 2015). Although teachers do not have traditional caring responsibilities the way parents or medical professionals do, we still have a duty of care to our students and have ethics of care within our practices.

One of the session resources we were given as a case study ‘A time to reflect’ (an excerpt from Bruce Macfarlane’s text Teaching With Integrity: The Ethics of Higher Education Practice) is an example of how compassion fatigue can manifest in teaching. The text gives a fictional account of teacher Stephanie Rae, who is clearly burnt out. She has too many teaching responsibilities, not much time to do them in, and grows increasingly frustrated by the critique she receives about the “boring readings” from her students on their end of term evaluation forms. Stephanie is also frustrated by the teachings of a charismatic colleague who, she feels, creates an engaging learning environment but does not take well to criticism and neglects nuance in his approach. Noteworthy here is Stephanie’s lack of reflection when it comes to her own responses to critique. She is overwhelmed with work, feels she is doing the best she can and cannot see why the students are not responding to her lessons the way she thinks they should. As a result of being burnt out, she has very little time to pause and reflect on her teaching methods or on her own positionality and how these could be impacting her relationship with her students. Although she ostensibly cares about her students and wants them to do well on the course and enjoy their learning experience, she does not seem to be able to marry that with compassion for their individual or collective circumstances. To return to the Cooper quote, Stephanie appears to have no joy or sense of humour in the act of teaching anymore (if she ever did). The term ‘self-care’ now seems trite, but within the context of teaching and learning, it is as important for teachers to care for and maintain their own wellbeing as it is for them to care for the wellbeing of their students.

Bibliography

Jordan, L (2020) Google doc featuring lecture notes on Love and Belonging in the Educational Realm.

Ro, C., 2019. Dunbar’s Number: Why We Can Only Maintain 150 Relationships. [online] Bbc.com. Available at: <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191001-dunbars-number-why-we-can-only-maintain-150-relationships#:~:text=The%20theory%20of%20Dunbar’s%20number,about%20150%20connections%20at%20once.>

He, Y., n.d. Q: Why Asian Students Are So Quiet?. [online] Shadesofnoir.org.uk. Available at: <https://shadesofnoir.org.uk/q-why-asian-students-are-so-quiet/>

Chapman, G., 2015. The 5 Love Languages. Chicago: Northfield Pub.

Macfarlane, B., 2009. A Time to Reflect, from Teaching With Integrity. London: Routledge.

Levitin, D., 2015. Why The Modern World Is Bad For Your Brain. [online] the Guardian. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload>

Bourg Carter, S., 2014. Are You Suffering From Compassion Fatigue?. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: <https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/high-octane-women/201407/are-you-suffering-compassion-fatigue>