Compassionate Pedagogy

Compassion means to notice but not normalise distress of yourself or others.

The Compassionate Pedagogy Learning Circle will focus on holistic, person-centred approaches to how we interact across the university, aiming to ensure compassion is imbued throughout Warwick. The University of Warwick, like many other universities, has a community of around 30,000 people, and this means that as a community we have a huge array of unique paths and perspectives. While inclusion and diversity are cornerstones of the Warwick community, now that we are all here, how do we ensure we coexist in a way that enables everyone to thrive? This Learning Circle aims to foster compassion across staff and students through a series of reflection activities, focus groups/workshops and vlogs/blogs, aiming to develop resources and guidelines to support compassion where appropriate.

Ecological Systems Approach to Compassion within HE

Further to our aim of taking a holistic lens to compassion, we are grounding our work within an Ecological systems approach (Bronfenbenner, 1977). This model highlights multiple systems that influence development, both individually and through interaction with each other. Within HE Ecological systems theory has already been used to explore student wellbeing (Thompson et al., 2022), curriculum design (Fovet, 2021) and EDI (Nolan and Owen, 2024) within HE, but not specifically focused on compassion.

When applied to compassion in HE, we can situate an individual at the centre of the system, whether that is a student or staff, and explore different systems that contribute to compassionate experience.

The microsystem focuses on factors in the persons immediate environment, such as relationships with the peers, colleagues or teaching staff. The mesosystem focuses on systemic factors that may interact and affect the microsystem – within this context, pedagogy, assessment approaches and inclusive practices may serve to increase or decrease a sense of compassion, both with the system and for the individual. The exosystem focuses on settings beyond the classroom, and may extend to policy development, committees and senior leadership approaches within the university. Two further systems take in wider factors that may contribute to compassion approaches at lower level: the Macrosystem, which includes historical and social context, as well as government policy and the chronosystem which refers to factors that change over time.

The Compassion Pedagogy learning circle aims to develop compassion across Warwick, through exploration of approaches currently used within the micro and mesosystems. Through shining a light on these and establishing what works, we aim to influence approaches used within the Exosystem to foster a compassionate, sustainable ecosystem.

By the end of the 2024/25 academic year, the Learning Circle aims to achieve:

• A better understanding of compassion at the micro and meso system levels
• A series of meetings to discuss compassionate approaches across policy and practice.
• Review resources targeted at supporting staff and students to incorporate more compassionate approaches to their activities at university.
• Co-created resources to explore shared experience through encouraging compassionate interpersonal connection across the university. This will involve discussion about compassion, identity and what this means in different contexts for staff and students.

Current members of this Learning Circle include:

• Gemma Gray (co-lead)
• Luke Hodson (co-lead)
• Jane Andrews
• Romain Chenet
• Denver Thorpe
• Martyn Parker
• Gavin Schwartz-Leeper
• Mairi Macintyre
• Cheryl Cane
• Claudie Fox
• Tom Ritchie
• Jagjeet Jutley-Neilson
• Edward Loveman
• Eleanor Reynolds
• Julie Eyden
• Emily Unwin

Terms of reference

Compassionate Pedagogies sub-groups

• Compassion Fatigue
• Ethics and Compassion