Belonging through Compassion: Developing a digital resource to foster a sense of belonging in higher education through compassionate pedagogies and practices

This workshop presents the research and development of a website resource that aims to create cultures of belonging and compassion within learning and teaching. As two educational developers, we take compassion as our guiding principle – to reduce distress and harm (Gilbert, 2017) and have developed our website to bring to together different contributions that have helped to guide, shape and challenge our collective thinking about compassionate pedagogy and belonging. Belonging is social and relational built on human and nonhuman connection. In our website we explore principles of trust, care, respect and self-compassion in developing nurturing educational relationships as a place to unfold transformative paths.

In January 2022, we received a University of the Arts London (UAL) supported seed fund from the Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange to develop a resource to support the work of the Academic Enhancement Team. We present our Action Research which included semi-structured interviews with educational developers and learning designers to enquire: How do staff experience and use synchronous and a-synchronous educational enhancement digital resources?

We built the website with content which was brought together from our learnings of working collaboratively with 13 course teams across UAL and to actualise our key aims:
• Widen the conversation in response to structural inequalities, to position compassion and belonging within pedagogies, policies and practices
• Create polyvocal, affective resources to support student success and staff & student wellbeing in learning environments

In this workshop we invite participants to explore the website and take part in a collaborative discussion to consider how this could impact their own teaching and learning contexts.

Website access here: https://belongingthroughcompassion.myblog.arts.ac.uk/

References Gilbert, T. (2017). ‘When Looking is Allowed: What Compassionate Group Work Looks Like in a UK University’. In Gibbs, P. (Ed.), The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education, Cham: Springer, pp. 189-202