Dr. Nathan Thayer

Caring Pedagogy: crafting supportive, welcoming spaces for student success: The higher education classroom is a dynamic space complicated by power relations, personal experiences, and broader societal trends. As students and educators enter the classroom, they bring with them a bundle of advantages, stressors, and discomforts that impact teaching and learning. Critical pedagogists have argued for educators to take up a caring approach - one in which supporting student comfort, wellbeing, and inclusion is a guiding principle - in order to work against these discomforts. In this talk, I will first discuss what a care centered approach to teaching entails, focusing on the potential benefits of such an approach while remaining mindful of its challenges. Next, I provide an example of a caring strategy drawn from my own research, which looks at caring strategies for getting students to engage in discomforting topics. Finally, we’ll leave on a discussion on easy ways to begin implementing caring approaches in the classroom. Our practices as educators, the interactions in classrooms, and each individual’s positionality actively construct dynamic classroom environments. Centering on an approach which remains flexible and attentive of students’ needs provides an avenue for crafting spaces in which students (and educators) feel welcome and ready to engage.