1 Placing Students at the Heart Centre: Using a Compassionate Lens in the Selection and Use of Open Assessment

Positionality Statement

As an educator, I believe it is important to reflect upon my own positionality to understand how my background influences my teaching practices, my work with colleagues, and my writing.

For starters, I am a white woman who grew up in a middle class family in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. My mother and father, who immigrated to Canada from Egypt and the UK respectively, valued the importance of multicultural experiences and preserving their heritage, giving my family many opportunities to see different parts of the world.

I am also a first-generation post-secondary graduate who originally felt challenged by the demands of the university environment, especially the large lecture halls and the lack of relationships I had with my professors. While I failed out of university after my first year and spent the next several years going to a local community college, I eventually earned a graduate degree in education.

These experiences have shaped who I am. Travel, and the discussions and reflections about these experiences, helped shape some of my core beliefs about diversity and inclusion. My post-secondary experience shaped my feelings around the importance of the relational part of education and the need for students’ whole selves to be supported during life transitions. As a result, I strongly believe in education as a practice that focuses on human connection, building relationships, and fostering community. This belief has guided my teaching and my work with my colleagues over the past two decades. Additionally, I also recognize that I may have implicit biases based on my cultural background, and I continue to find opportunities to challenge my biases within both my work and personal life.

Currently, as an instructor teaching first year courses in communication, I have worked hard to integrate learnings from my experiences. My goal is to support students’ wellbeing, allow them to have a voice within their classes, and show them I value their opinions. To do this I utilize trauma-aware and humanizing pedagogies within my classes, such as open classroom practices that focus on collaboration and co-creation (e.g., active learning strategies and activities), alongside assessment practices that are non-traditional and flexible.

I am also an educational developer and curriculum coordinator supporting faculty to support the learning of students. This work has allowed me to witness the uncertainty and stress that faculty face. For this reason, I come from a place of compassion when I work with faculty, seeking to understand their stories and how I may support them through learning and change. I can say with confidence that every faculty member I have worked with, though their pedagogies may differ, share the same type of care for their students; faculty want their students to be successful in the classroom so that they may be successful in the workplace. It is this lens that drives my passion to continue to support my colleagues.

Finally, my self-work, especially during the last fifteen years, has focused on self-compassion and cultivating loving kindness. It is my strong belief that these priorities have helped to inject purpose into my work.

Introduction

We are at a critical time in post-secondary education. Together, students and faculty have come through a global pandemic which challenged us to adapt to new ways of being in our learning environments. The social and economic impacts continue to plague many. I have witnessed students’ and colleagues’ low engagement levels in the classroom and in meetings, watched some struggle with their mental health, and observed a general apathy towards personal  practices and educational pathways.

Compassion for learners during the pandemic appeared in multiple ways, such as flexible deadlines, greater choice in assessment methods, and approved withdrawals for extenuating circumstances. Shifting to an online Zoom environment allowed for those in remote areas to add their voices to conversations that geographical boundaries may have prevented in the past. However, as we returned to our campuses, the end of the year brought a new challenge to our classrooms: generative AI.  For many of us, the last two years have been ones peppered with fear and an obsessive need to keep up with this continually changing technological landscape. In addition to moving away from compassion, I have witnessed, both in person and online, an increase in moral outrage, technical fatigue and a divisive campus culture. I am seeing more colleagues questioning their own pedagogies and seeking guidance from others regarding innovative practices they can use to adapt to these changing classrooms. I am also noticing faculty requiring guidance around the ethics of generative AI and how to disseminate this knowledge  to students. This step into collective introspective pedagogy, examining our own thoughts and feelings related to our teaching and our students’ learning, has been one fraught with anxiety, conflict, and confusion.

I would argue that now, more than ever, compassion has a vital role to play in higher education. Educators need to see their colleagues and students as whole people who have lives outside of the institution. We need to acknowledge suffering and embed compassion into our culture, our teaching and learning practices, and assessment. We also need to remember our experiences of being students, and use self-compassion to nurture ourselves as we encounter what could be viewed as one of the more challenging times to be an educator.

The following chapter will discuss the topic of compassion and its role in the selection and use of open educational assessment practices. Drawing on research and practice that centers compassion within assessment activities and everyday life, it will focus on four emerging themes, namely: understanding compassionate assessment, self-compassion and assessment, compassion for students in assessment, and compassion for faculty in assessment practices. It will propose that embracing and integrating open assessment practices offers a meaningful path forward.

Understanding Compassionate Assessment

A distinction should first be made about the difference between empathy and compassion, as they tend to be used interchangeably in the literature (Andrew et al., 2023;Kramlich & Beck, 2021; Waddington, 2016). According to Kaufman and Schipper (2018) in their book, Teaching with Compassion “empathy involves placing oneself metaphorically in the shoes of another (I feel your pain), compassion draws on the capacity to be present in the face of suffering and selflessly seek to eliminate it where it occurs (“I will work to relieve your pain”). (p. xix). Waddington (2016) also adds that compassion involves both feelings and a response to those feelings. For example, an instructor sees many students struggling with test anxiety and feels for them (empathy), then decides to act by selecting alternative modes of assessment to ease their challenges (compassion). By assuming a role in students’ stories, we work to address student suffering.

Finding research related to compassionate assessment in higher learning is not easy (Waddington, 2016), yet, inclusive, open, and authentic assessment, though not explicitly tied to compassion in the literature, can be viewed as incorporating values of care and compassion into practice (Andrew et al., 2023; Ramrathan, 2017). It can be argued, then, that faculty who choose to adopt open assessments are beginning to make compassionate choices based on wanting to support students who may be suffering financially. There are many faculty with whom I work, though tempted by the publishers’ online resources and assessments that students must pay for, are questioning the ethics of this practice. To simply make the decision to look for open assessment alternatives can be viewed as an important gateway to a more compassionate approach to assessment selection, but it is important to note that the words “beginning” and “gateway” are used intentionally here.

Noddings (2012) says that learning is based on caring and relationships, involves listening and dialogue with learners, demands prioritizing emotional support over content, and thrives in a classroom that fosters trust, cooperation, moral development and personal growth for learners. Caring teachers are ones who listen to learners’ needs, wants, and desires and show them that their voices are important. Nodding’s work gives us a foundational platform for connecting the practice of open to the role of compassion to teaching and to assessment.

Not long after the pandemic, Gachago et al. (2022) developed a framework for compassionate learning design that involves understanding the emotional and psychological needs of learners and fostering a supportive and caring educational environment. It invites faculty to move from a space of empathy in their pedagogy to an active place of compassion. The model draws upon humanizing pedagogy (Selkrig et al., 2023), pedagogies of care (Noddings, 2012), and trauma-informed design (Costa, 2020) with an aim to enhance learner participation and centre social justice. Gachago et al.’s (2022) definition of compassion in learning design encompasses four dimensions:

1. Participation: Increasing learner agency in the classroom involves shifting from teaching “to” and “for” students to teaching “with” students, where learners feel recognized and empowered. Teaching “to” students means anticipating learners’ needs without directly asking them what those needs are. Teaching “for” students involves gathering information about students’ needs through surveys or self-assessments, but it limits options to predefined categories that may not fully address individual differences. The goal is to move toward teaching “with” students, where learner agency and empowerment take root, and individual needs are better met. Ultimately, this approach can evolve into a “by” and “as” model, where learners take full control, determining their own learning processes and assessments.  (See figure 1 below).

Figure 1: From Designing with Empathy to Co-designing with Compassion (Gachago et al., (2022).

2. Justice: An understanding of power and history (our own positionality and intersectionality) and how it  affects learners’ ability to participate. In the institution in which I work, most students are international and have English as their second language. Many are from cultures that dictate silence in the classroom. Participation in the classroom for them through speaking can be uncomfortable. These power dynamics need to be discussed in the open so that students and faculty can reflect together and come up with just ways for students to contribute.
3. Care: Recognizing the impact of affect on learning, including humanizing and trauma informed/aware pedagogies. In practice this can look like getting to know students and sharing parts about your own whole self, engaging with them in a variety of ways, letting them know you care (sometimes we need to say this explicitly), and providing anonymous ways for students to check-in with you.
4. Praxis: The commitment to act and move toward socially just learning design taking responsibility for caring, fair, and inclusive environments.Compassion involves moving beyond feelings of empathy—shifting from “to” and “for” to action “by” and “as.” This transition represents a shift from merely feeling for and discussing students’ struggles to actively addressing and alleviating them.   The authors contend that once participation, justice and care are in place, this fourth dimension can come into play involving both reflexive practice and action.

In practice, we can use the work of Nodding’s (2012) and Gachago et al.’s (2022) framework to apply a compassionate lens to the selection and use of open materials.

For example, faculty choose open textbooks for their students. Faculty find out who their students are and remix and change elements of the textbook so that their students are represented in the literature. Faculty believe that every voice is important and want to work to include students in their assessments, so together they co-create case studies, rubrics, and syllabus statements (with). In doing this, faculty are moving from what they think students should do to engaging with them in a relationship that focuses on trust and is underpinned by social justice.

These models, which will continue to be connected to practice later in this chapter, give us a way to think about how we can move from a place of noticing to acting. However, it is important to note that if we do not have a clear understanding of personal challenges that may be holding us back, I would argue that this work cannot take place. Compassion needs to be addressed as a relational holistic praxis that includes compassion for oneself. Consider this prose from the American Buddhist nun Chödrön (2001) in her book, The Places that Scare You:

“Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move   gently toward what scares us….Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity” (p. 50, para.2).

Starting with our own hearts: Self-Compassion

“Self-compassion has the power to radically transform our mental and emotional reality (Neff, 2011, p. 246).

Placing students at the center begins with focusing on our own hearts. I realize this may seem counterintuitive at first, especially considering the feelings of exhaustion that accompany the daunting task of grading piles of assignments at the end of a term. In these moments, providing constructive, empathic feedback to our students becomes challenging when we ourselves are not feeling whole. Thus, caring for our own emotional and mental health is essential in ensuring that we can effectively support and guide our students toward their academic success. Kramlich and Beck (2021) discuss the need for self-compassion in our teaching and learning practices, particularly after the impacts felt from the global pandemic.

The pioneering research of Neff (2003) discusses a self-compassionate approach that highlights the need to start with ourselves first. Neff (2011) defines self-compassion as the recognition of our own suffering with self-kindness versus self judgement (mindfulness), the realization that many others are experiencing what we are experiencing (common humanity), and the practice of being loving and kind to oneself.

Self-compassionate individuals have lower anxiety and depression levels and employ more adaptive coping strategies than their less self-compassionate peers (Neff, Hsieh, & Dejitterat, 2005). Other benefits of self-compassion include building self-resiliency,becoming more authentic as educators, and engaging in more mindful self-reflection about teaching practices (Kramlich & Beck, 2021).

The following practice can support us when thinking about shifting our assessment use and choices to a more open framework (adapted from Self-Compassion, by Kristin Neff, 2011).

• Step 1: Mindfulness: This step involves acknowledging our own suffering and accepting it for what it is. It may look at reflecting upon our own assessment experiences and acknowledging our feelings. I still vividly remember the first time I handed out exams to my class—my heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking. Upon reflection, I realized that this reaction stemmed from my own memories of sitting in an exam hall with 500 other students, taking a test that often determined 50% of my grade. Looking back, I now understand how anxiety-provoking that experience was for me. Reflecting on these moments can lead to a critical examination of our own assessment practices, encouraging us to consider how they impact our students. It can involve exploring some self-assessments like the free ones from the Greater Good Science Centre (Quizzes, 2024) and completing a self-compassion test where you can learn about your strengths and areas that may need more attention.

• Step 2: Common humanity: This step involves acknowledging that colleagues may share similar  feelings and may also be feeling challenged by evaluating their own assessment methods.The importance of building community can be an actionable outcome from this part of the process as discussed by Neff (as cited in Kaufman and Schipper, 2018). For some faculty, this community building may look like reaching out to a trusted colleague to let them know their struggles, which often results in  learning that feelings may be mutual. However, many faculty are sessional, working remotely and/or working at more than one institution, making connecting more difficult or unsafe. Sessional staff may retreat to open spaces such as blogs or LinkedIn to learn about what other faculty are doing and how they are feeling. This is when connection in the “open” can take place. Faculty on these sites are writing about the current uncertainty in education, showing their own vulnerability, and questioning their own practices. This feeling of finding comfort in connecting with humans, many of whom are working under similar constraints is very much a part of building that common humanity through community. We will examine the community concept in more detail in the final section, focused on compassion for our colleagues.

• Step 3: The final step involves being kind to ourselves. There needs to be an acceptance of what is achievable and realistic here when it comes to applying this to our assessment practices. For example, it is important to recognize  that every student may not be reached as there are some situations that are out of our control as faculty. We now have data that supports that student mental health challenges continue to increase in the United States (Barbayannis et al., 2022), and in Canada (Youth Mental Health and Wellness,  2023). Many students are homeless, working full-time, and are challenged with food insecurity. We need to understand that the world of open, and more specifically open resources for assessment will not be a panacea for everything. It is important to note that there are other ways that students can be reached within our institutions through counselling centers, financial aid programs, and student support staff. These are essential parts that can make up “compassionate institutions”, ones that support faculty to support students by offering services to students that faculty are not always able to provide. By tapping into these resources we are acknowledging ourselves in the process, for being kind to ourselves is also seeking out those who can help us. The following resources can support us in doing this important work:
  • Tara Brach has a meditation and reflection that centers on loving kindness that is supported by many recent studies.
  • Kristin Neff’s website has several tools including free loving kindness meditations, a self-compassion community (further supporting step 2).
  • Danielle De La Mare has a podcast called the Self-Compassionate Professor focusing specifically on this topic in higher education.

Compassion for students in the selection and design of Open Educational Assessments

“Teaching compassion is not just about being kind, it is also about entering the classroom with more verve, more fearlessness, and more adventure.” (Kauffman and Schipper, 2018, p.xxi).

Early on in my academic career, a colleague told me to always prototype assessments myself before administering them to students. Though a vital part of the quality assurance process, the act of trying to understand what students may feel during an assessment can be an important first step in a compassionate approach towards the selection and design of open assessment resources. Research in students’ perceptions of assessment practices supports that they can be a source of stress and anxiety for many (Andrew et al., 2023; McLean, 2018; Silverman et al., 2021).  This next section will focus on how faculty can select and design open assessments using compassion as a co-pilot to help navigate some of these stressors using inclusion and authenticity in our practice.

Inclusion as compassionate assessment

“An inclusive approach to education means that each individual’s needs are taken into account and that all learners participate and achieve together.” (UNESCO, 2023, para. 2). This definition  acknowledges that all human beings can learn and that everyone has unique characteristics, interests, abilities and learning needs. Special focus is placed on learners who may be at risk of marginalization, exclusion or underachievement.  To strive for an inclusive classroom is to take a compassionate approach.  BC Campus’s guide to diverse and inclusive representation in OER is  a useful framework for creating such a classroom. This resource provides examples and practices that work to ensure all students are included in the resources and allows for diverse representation in language, photos, and illustrations. Kaufman and Schipper (2011) assert the significance of setting aside our egos and critically examining our own assessment practices, including the embedded biases and experiences that might influence them. By embarking on this delicate compassionate journey, we can cultivate an inclusive approach towards assessment selection—one that embraces a diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds while ensuring accessibility.

Compassion for students often involves faculty stepping outside of commonly accepted practices within an institutional culture, questioning them, and adjusting their own lenses. It can look like faculty asking explicitly for feedback from students and being transparent about embedding that feedback into the classroom. It can be as nuanced as admitting that we are all learning in this new technological landscape, and we actually need to seek students’ voices in the process. It can also be uncomfortable, asking ourselves if our position of control is preventing students from learning and how we may change this dynamic. This type of critical pedagogy is found in the works of Freire (2017) and Hooks (2014) where teaching is seen as an act of transgression and educators are encouraged to challenge boundaries and systems of power. Their work emphasizes the importance of curiosity and introspection, encouraging us to question how we uphold power structures as we navigate the selection of appropriate open assessment methods.

Compassionate assessment in practice 

Using Gachago et al.’s (2022) framework (figure 1) of compassionate design, compassionate open assessment (though often messy and a work in progress for me) can look like this:

• Asking for feedback early, presenting the feedback to the students and showing them how changes were made to address this feedback.
• Having students co-create questions for exams using these tips from the University of Waterloo.
• Having one question on an exam that asks students to describe something that they learned in the course that was not on the exam. I will often turn these into questions for future tests.
• Using transparency in my teaching following the TILT model, particularly around assessments explaining why I am giving them this assessment and what they can get out of it.
• Having students write blogs and social media posts and always giving them a choice to share openly or not. Before social media, I used to have them write articles and contact the editor of a newspaper to see if they could get them published.
• Having students contribute to classroom guidelines.
• Co-creating rubrics and marking guides with students.
• Having students contribute to my slides using Google Slides and then posting them.
• Changing my office hours to “Tea Time” as a way for students to discuss assessments with me in a casual, non-threatening way.
• Always using language such as “us” and “together” and creating a community that embodies this language.

According to Bali et al. (2020), we need to critically evaluate and analyze our open educational practices as sometimes our initial intent to involve students  can end up doing unnecessary harm. Consider the example of a faculty member, who had compassionate intent to co-develop a case study with students; however, used open resources that were not reflective of marginalized students. We need to question and critique, with compassion, and learn from our students and each other. We need to embed these acts of relational accountability into our classrooms, our faculty meetings, and our discussions with administration. How do we do this?  We can ask students what they need. It seems a simple approach, but we can get a variety of answers that can provide a more individualized learning experience for our students.  We can also begin every semester with a growth mindset, recognizing that every class is different and every learner is unique.It is humbling; it is raw; we may make mistakes, and we should feel okay to share them freely and openly. As Hooks (2003) discusses in Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, these ways of being are often in opposition to institutional norms and depending on the security a faculty member has within their institution, can result in risk-taking. A sessional faculty member teaching courses at three institutions does not have the same privilege to take risks as a regular or tenured faculty member. Recognizing this limitation is an essential part of practicing compassion. At times, prioritizing self-care, setting boundaries, and understanding our own capacities must take precedence over taking action.

Compassion for colleagues in stewarding the open assessment process

“Compassion is not a practice of better than or I can fix you – it’s a practice based in the beauty and pain of shared humanity” (Brown, 2021, p.118).

We stand at a critical crossroads in the global landscape of post-secondary education—a moment that calls for listening, learning, and showing compassion toward those who feel stuck and overwhelmed.  While many of my colleagues are questioning their own pedagogies, others are questioning their worth in the field. Faculty are in need of support to support their own students.  Pallitt, Bali, and Gachago in 2022 applied their compassionate learning design framework (2022) to three cases of educational developers supporting faculty to support students in teaching and learning during the onset of the COVID19 pandemic.  In each case, the educational developers moved from a “to” and “for” model to more of a “with” and “by” model in supporting staff in the transition to emergency remote teaching.  In all cases, the “to” and “for” model began with a top down approach and it was up to the three educational developers to listen to faculty’s needs and wants so that they could implement activities that included faculty voice like panels, individual consultations, and open ways of sharing innovative practices. At Capilano University, our Centre for Teaching Excellence has also moved from a “to” and “for” model over the past several years. Since the pandemic, the center’s employees “with” faculty across the five faculties have developed a certificate in university teaching and learning (CUTL) focused on the current needs of faculty. The educational developer team moved to a “just in time” model of consultations, created multiple opportunities for faculty to share their ideas, and developed a student as partners program where students engage “with” faculty in communities of practice. We have explored themes around power structures in the classroom, social justice, vulnerability, and maintaining care and compassion for all members as we expose ourselves to experimentation and often uncomfortable, yet necessary discussions.

I have listened to faculty who are hesitant to make changes in their assessment practices and I recognize the multitude of complexities associated with making these changes. I see the extra work and cognitive load that it takes, and I hear that they may be fearful of making mistakes . I also acknowledge that making these shifts often requires a need to understand our own past experiences with assessment through the process of self-compassion. This will help us fully embrace changes and move forward. Conversely, while well-meaning faculty in some departments feel that policy may be the best way forward to ensure the adoption of appropriate assessment methods, this will need to be coupled with care, research supported examples, and plug and play activities that faculty can use, remix and revise, hence the practice of open education in assessment.  These “with” and “by” models need to become part of our culture embedding Gachago et al’s (2022) compassionate learning model that celebrates faculty agency and encourages sharing and learning from one another. Communities of practice, open repositories, blogs, and online groups can be further utilized for sharing open assessment practices using a compassionate lens as we attempt to create a culture of shared learning and pedagogy.  Similarly, having a draft of the policy openly available, including blog posts written “by” and “with” faculty, and sharing faculty created resources can help move  change forward as exemplified by Magill’s work (2023). Furthermore, it can help us create opportunities that act as gateways—rather than barriers—for faculty to adopt open assessments.  As we move into what Mills et al. (2023) refer to as the second educational shock since our pandemic with the advent of generative AI in mainstream education, it is imperative that we prioritize collaboration and compassion  especially when it comes to assessment.  Never has there been a more appropriate and significant time to do this.

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed the importance of embedding three areas of compassion into the use and design of open assessment: self-compassion, compassion for students, and compassion for our colleagues. By embracing self-compassion, collaborating with students through open and compassionate learning design, and fostering supportive, compassionate spaces for our colleagues, we can begin to pave the way toward meaningful and inclusive educational practices.This work is not without its challenges and risks and requires deep reflection, continued learning, and experimentation. It also involves the need to acknowledge that moving forward often requires radical institutional change. Faculty need to be given the time and space to be recognized and supported so they can begin to nurture their own hearts,  the hearts of others and cultivate compassionate learning spaces.

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