Abstract
Today there is a robust, theoretical basis, contributed by a range of disciplines, for rooting compassion into university curricula—an essential dimension to HE’s remit to serve the public good. Central to this is how compassion has come to be introduced to be credit bearing towards degrees, for example, in terms of assessment practice for group work, seminars and tutorials, in parts of the University of Hertfordshire (UH).
This chapter focuses on one of the essential micro-skills of compassion that is easily taught in HE: the use of eye gaze for deliberatively compassionate purposes in group work. The UH has found this skill, among others, to be a key mediator of students’ noticing and addressing distress and/or disadvantaging of others in group work. The chapter explains how assessing such demonstrable, compassionate behaviours has mediated participant groups’ levels of inclusivity and critical thinking performance in three UH departments.
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Notes
- 1.
Many employers feel universities do not hear them in this regard, and it was in this survey that it was found they are ‘not really convinced that universities prepare graduates for work’ (ibid.: 8). The survey was of 12 major UK organizations employing thousands of graduate recruits.
- 2.
S3, White local UG female; one-to-one interview transcript p. 9, lines 252–255.
- 3.
These were two tutors who rejected the notion of compassion in their seminars as wholly inappropriate; students were not to treat each other as though they were ‘family members’ but as ‘professional teams’. In effect, this allowed collection of useful data from a control group.
- 4.
S16 international/Malaysian male, interview transcript p. 7, line 170.
- 5.
S16 international/Malaysian male, interview transcript p. 7, lines 165–66.
- 6.
T3 male seminar tutor; English literature; one-to-one interview transcript, p. 2, lines 21–28.
- 7.
S26 Local White male, Business, focus group transcript, p. 3, lines 77–78.
- 8.
- 9.
This kind of literature search finding, potentially relatable to a concept of compassion for seminar management, was presented to students to consider in their first seminars, that is, on those modules that were using compassion-focused pedagogy.
- 10.
T3, stage one, one-to-one interview transcript, p. 3, lines 81–83.
- 11.
S2 female, one-to-one interview transcript, p. 2, lines 93–94.
- 12.
S1 White, local, UG female, one-to-one interview transcript, p. 3, line 92.
- 13.
All names used here are pseudonyms.
- 14.
No threatening interventions were seen, and this compared favourably with the early suggestions by some students in whole group discussion that to challenge disadvantaging behaviours directly and verbally would be helpful.
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Gilbert, T. (2017). When Looking Is Allowed: What Compassionate Group Work Looks Like in a UK University. In: Gibbs, P. (eds) The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8_13
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