Cate Denial on Kindness and Boundaries

In episode 3 of season 3, I speak with Dr. Cate Denial about her concept of a pedagogy of kindness and how boundaries are a kindness in and of themselves.

Transcript

RPR: Hello listeners. Welcome to the agile academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. This season, I talked with my special guests from all over academia about purpose values and what it means to be an advocate in higher ed for students to labor the kindness and for balance and self-care.  I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark. 

Hi Cate. Thanks for being here today. 

Cate Denial:      It's lovely to be with you. 

RPR:                 Why don't you just tell us a, tell the audience a little bit about yourself before we jump in. 

CD:                   So I am a history professor at Knox College in Illinois. I am also the chair of the department and the director at the Bright Institute at Knox College. The Bright Institute is an institute for other liberal arts professors in history who study America before 1848. 

RPR:                 And what kind of wonderful things do you do with that particular in Institute? 

CD:                   So we have a two-week seminar every summer, late in the summer, and we bring in an eminent historian and a pedagogical expert. And the historian leads is in talking about a specific field of scholarship, the newest stuff, so that we all get caught up. And then we  talk, uh, about teaching for three full days and how to take what we learned in the seminar part of things and apply it to our classrooms because as liberal arts professors, we spend a lot of time teaching. So it's important to us to be able to take everything we've learned about the new scholarship and then turn it into really great classroom activities, too. 

RPR:                 That sounds really exciting. 

CD:                   Yeah. We also give everybody $3,000 a year of research funding and, uh, and support throughout the year to be able to do that. We workshop each other's writing. It's a really fun program. 

RPR:                 That sounds amazing. We need more programs like that across, across the humanities, but those would be really interesting in STEM too. 

CD:                   Yes, absolutely. 

RPR:                 Well, one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on is because I think you have an amazing purpose in what you do. And I think the things that you do with Bright Institute kind of, um, feeds into the as well. So I'm gonna ask the big question and say, what would you say is your purpose in higher education? 

CD:                   I think my purpose is to facilitate other people realizing their hopes. So I don't think I'm ever gonna be known as some big researcher or memorable historian necessarily, but I do think that what I'm very good at is creating the circumstances for other people to do incredible things. The Bright Institute is one example of that. That was my idea. I wanted to take, uh, we got a donation at Knox College from an alum, and it was a very generous donation to the point where spending the interest every year is kind of a challenge. Now it's a, our diamond shoes are too tight, kind of a challenge, right? But it was something we really had to give serious thought to what is the best way to be a steward of this gift. So I came up with the idea that what liberal arts professors needed was time to catch up on scholarship support in their teaching and support to be able to do research since we tend to not get big grants and prizes and fellowships at the rate that people at large research institutions do. 

                        So we came up with the Bright Institute and it has been such a sustaining joy for me to make that Institute what it is  to put together this two week seminar where everyone's needs are completely taken care of, no matter what someone needs in those two weeks, I make sure they get it. And then to be able to support people all year round. I think it's an extension of who I am as a teacher that I love facilitating seeing my students grow and change. Right? And so I think that that also bleeds over into my pedagogy work and the way that I think about pedagogy as something that can really enact change beyond our classroom, even though it's rooted in our classroom. So yeah, I would say that's my purpose. 

RPR:                 What is, what is some of the things that you really truly love about teaching? 

CD:                   I love moments of transformation and I love being able to give back to people who have been denied their history, their history. So today is a great example and teaching a class on the history of birth control and reproduction in the United States, we were talking about the mid 19th century, the Seneca Falls convention, who it did and did not reach, uh, who it was and wasn't concerned with. And then one of my students asked, uh, a question about queer women. And for 25 minutes, we were off on a tangent about queer people in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, what we do and do not know how people would have described themselves. What does it mean to exist as a queer person before this becomes an identity marker? Right? No one in the room knew that history and it is so joyful and satisfying to be able to go like here, have this back, this has been taken from you and it's been deliberately taken from you, right? So let's, let's engage in something that's really liberating to like consider the stories that we haven't heard before. 

RPR:                 Sounds like a wonderful class. 

CD:                   It's so much fun. It's one of my favorite classes to teach because, uh, we colloquially call it Sex Ed 2, because it's every question everybody's ever had about the body in a, in a new way. So it's incredibly fun and transformational and I always end up learning something new every time I teach it too 

RPR:                 Exciting. What other classes do you love to teach? 

CD:                   I love, uh, teaching the native history classes that I teach, especially because most of my students did not get any native history in high school, or if they did, it was very slanted towards a white perspective on native people. So centering the voices of native communities and native people is important to the way I approach those courses. And again, it changes everything. Once you do that, the whole narrative about American history is completely different. So that's super fun. I also teach, I taught a class on the history of marriage for a while. That was really exciting because marriage is at the heart of our relationship to our government, whether or not we are individually married, whether or not we are permitted to get married, whether or not there are structural reasons we can't get married. So exploring that with students was always so exciting. I'm fun. And I have a new course in development about black women organizing since the Revolution. And I can't wait to teach that class. It's gonna be so much fun to focus on gender and political organizing and activism in a very different way, from the way that we often think about those things. 

RPR:                 It's really wonderful to see how much your face lights up when you talk about your teaching and your students, and to see that joy and the passion in teaching those subjects, that that gives students back some of their history, like you said, and I can see that's a real value for you. What are some of the other personal and professional values that you think you bring to your work? 

CD:                   Kindness is really important to me, compassion in all its forms. Compassion is important to me for so many reasons it's important because it gave me a path through some really difficult years of my life, learning how to be kind to myself and give myself space and grace and forgiveness. It then became something that I realized my classroom was lacking. Not surprisingly, right. If I couldn't be kind to myself, then my awareness of being kind to other people was also limited. I don't think I was deliberately unkind to anybody, but I didn't prioritize it. But now kindness is my default position. And I don't mean by that, that somehow I've reached some kind of weird enlightenment. I mean that, it's a discipline for me that I always ask myself, what is the kind thing to do here? What is the kind thing to do here before I send an email or make a decision or think about how expensive a book is that I want to assign or going to a meeting with my colleagues. 

                        It's always about defaulting to the compassionate choice. It's not necessarily about feeling compassionate all the time. People often ask me about that. Like, how do you feel this? And my answer is you're not gonna feel it all time. So you have to have a sort of structure for yourself where it does become a question that you pose. So that even on the days when your heart's sick or you're exhausted or you're angry, or you are just at the end of your tether, whatever it is, you still go to that place and ask yourself, what is the kind thing to do? I have never regretted being kind. I have absolutely regretted acting in haste saying things that felt great at the moment that were snarky or hurtful to other people. So I think it served me really well. 

RPR:                 How do you define kindness in this sense? 

CD:                   I often start by defining what it is not, and it is not niceness. Those two things often get conflated, especially in the Midwest, but kindness is not niceness. Niceness has no problem with lying. Kindness is honest. Niceness will paper over cracks in our social relationships. It will paper over issues in our institutions like precarity or quote unquote rigor and tradition that often are covers for very other kinds of concerns. So kindness is for me about justice. And it's about belief. It's about believing students when they talk to us and what they tell us. And it's about believing in students to be collaborators, to be people who are equally invested and what their learning experience is gonna be like. 

RPR:                 You have some amazing work on what you call the pedagogy of kindness. Can you tell us a little bit more about where that came from? 

CD:                   So the crystallizing moment for me was at the Digital Pedagogy Institute in 2017. Everything about that Institute was predicated on kindness, everything, but there was a really particular moment where Chris Friend in the intro track asked directly, why not become, I don't remember the question that was an answer to anymore, but the, or this, I don't remember the situation that someone had posed to get the answer. Why not be kind, but why not be kind, just like hit me. It resonated, like I was a bell that had just been struck because I couldn't answer. So the question why not be kind? And I was just sort of flailing around sort of going, like, that's a great point. I've never considered it that way. So I went away and I revamped everything. I completely changed my syllabus, my assignment sheets, the way that I thought about our classroom activities. 

                        And it started to pay dividends really quickly in that the trust between myself and my students increased exponentially. And in other ways, things that I noticed, like I didn't get first day jitters anymore. I wasn't worried about walking into the classroom because they weren't my antagonists, they were my collaborators. Right. So I kept thinking about this idea of kindness on what does it look like if we take compassion as essential principle in everything that we do when we teach. And so I started to think about policies, change, language changes, expression changes, assignments, change, grading changes, right? It just has this knock on effect. And so really since 2017, I've been exploring for myself all the ways in which compassion can change things. And I've been writing some of my, my ideas down, I'm working on a book called A Pedagogy of Kindness, and it has been incredibly challenging and fun to try and take ideas that I have and express them so that other people can understand that. So I have just written myself into a corner for example, of about kindness and assignments, because I posed to myself the question couldn't assignments be about joy, and I don't have an answer to that yet. So the process of writing this book is continuing to stretch me and to stretch the concept of compassion. And to ask me to think about what are the most radical ways that being kind can make a really strong intervention in our classrooms. 

RPR:                 That's really exciting. I'm sure it's a book that many of us look forward to reading. You have a, a, a brilliant essay. Um, I think that the 2019 essay on the pedagogy of kindness and kind of introducing those ideas, which I will absolutely link to in the show notes, because everyone should read it. It's amazing. And I remember one thing kind of from the beginning just stood out to me, cause it is something that I have done it. You mentioned kind of at the beginning of class, the, that those early days of class, you know, being a hard-ass at first so that they are they're, they're not gonna push you and you can be softer later. And I that's absolutely advice I remember giving to, to fellow graduate students as well. It's the things that we perpetuate. We don't even, we don't even think about, 

CD:                   Right. We're taught to think that students are antagonists and it's handed down from professor to grad student grad student to grad student. Right. I think it's probably then even handed down to undergraduates, right. And the way that they think about their own education, I handed realized that I was in opposition to my students, that I had styled them as my antagonists. When I was asked at Digital Pedagogy Lab to take a look at my syllabus and express who I was writing it to to describe my audience. I realized that it was someone I didn't trust that there was suspicion running through the entire document. And I had never seen it before. I was pretty proud of my syllabus. By that point, I thought it was one of the more progressive things I had seen. And I was proud of the fact that, like I had some flexibility in my attendance policy and stuff like that. 

                        But once I looked at it and wondered, why is distrust here? Where does that get me or get my students? Then I realized that it absolutely didn't make sense and I needed to rewrite everything. And I needed to make trust the centerpiece of everything that I did this realization about kindness, also intersected with myself and, uh, Gabrielle Raley also at Knox founding the intergroup dialogue program that we have at Knox. We call it Social Justice Dialogues and intergroup dialogue is a important and structured way of having conversations around social identities. And difference is also a process and a practice that once you enter into it spills everywhere. Like you can't contain it. You can't try this way of communicating and then suddenly go, well, that's just for that one class and I'm not gonna take it anywhere else. So working with Gabe on intergroup dialogue, coincided with these other realizations I was having about my teaching and it all sort of came together in that moment so that I had to take a step back and go, who I have been is not who I wanna continue to be. So what do I need to change? 

RPR:                 I think about that a lot in terms of those of us who have taught at liberal arts-focused institutions, I was in a liberal arts focused institution for 12 years. I'm now at a technical Institute and see those issues playing out in very different ways in the different contexts and, and trying to be trying to be respectful of the perspective that those folks are coming from and still thinking about how do we help them understand students from a different perspective? How do we help them take some of this, this pedagogical knowledge and care with them into the classroom? And many of them do, but like you, they might be doing it in a way that isn't actually what they think they're doing. 

CD:                   I think that's really true. I think that don't think there are many educators who aren't trying to be good people in the classroom, right? They wanna be great teachers. They want to really have a connection with their students. They want those students to learn, but not everybody is equally resourced. Not everybody is equally. So not everybody has the time to discover the things that I had the time to discover. Not everybody has an opportunity or the freedom to experiment in their classroom until they get it the way that they want it to be. So I think that there's a lot of frustrated teachers [00:19:30] who want understand why it's not quite working out the way that they, they think, or why is it so hard? Why is it so often brutal? Why is it so antagonistic? And I'm hoping that talking about kindness and thinking about kindness and expanding upon that and state that I wrote will be one way to put some of the learning I at the time to do into the hands of people who don't have those resources support our time. 

RPR:                 And I think the pandemic opened a lot of avenues to that. It, it was, we saw an interesting split and this isn't just at my institution early on in the pandemic. We have to make these switches we're going into this environment that none of us chose to go into, but also thinking about, you know, seeing faculty members who were very deeply concerned about cheating that environment and thinking about surveillance technologies. And in some ways it's just, I think for a lot of folks, it was trying to control something 

CD:                   Yeah. 

RPR:                 To control something that they couldn't control in other ways. So I don't necessarily think that those folks are out to get their students, but we all were dealing with a lot that, that pushed our, our levels of compassion in different ways, I think. 

CD:                   Yeah. Um, and pushed our buttons on a lot of different issues. Right. True. When you are an instructor in a classroom, one of the things that you are taught, especially I think for me in grad school was the idea that you are supposed to have total control over that space, right? And until you get to a point where you feel comfortable letting go of that, or circumstances are such that you can let go of that. Then when it is ripped away from you, when the pandemic happens, for example, suddenly it's so disorienting is you have no control over this and you have no control over your own teaching anymore. You don't have control on for the things that you thought you were really great at because the modality has changed. And I think it's really crucial. What you said about it's was a choice that people didn't get to make, right. 

                        They didn't choose to go online and do the wonderful thing that online educators have been doing for a really long time. And their students didn't get to choose to be online because it worked best for them. Everybody was thrown there. So that loss of control is like a crisis for people. So I understand why people made. So, um, decisions that in retrospect, maybe don't hold up, but at the time who can blame anybody for the sort of panic of that moment and the wondering if we were capable of doing what we were being asked to do. 

RPR:                 Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the things that you saw coming out of the pandemic that you do associate with the pedagogy of kindness? 

CD:                   I think a lot of people saw up close and personal. Just what a struggle education can be, especially for our students, but also for each other. I think a lot of people were invited into their student homes. And so the circumstances under which some of our students are living, or, and I don't mean that in derogatory sense, I just mean that they saw that they were trying to share their wifi with three siblings. And there was no dedicated room where they could be quiet and they were scrambling over limited resources is right. I think that a lot of people gave wiggle room and grace who maybe hadn't done so before, because they recognized they were in bad need of it themselves. And so they extended it to other people. And I think that the flexibility that was demanded of the way of thinking about asynchronous or synchronous instruction online or in a physical classroom, I think all of those things have really given us all more tools now to think about what kindness is. 

                        So Wednesday here, we had an enormous snowstorm and seven inches of snow dropped for where I live. That's not an incredible amount of snow, but it's enough to really disrupt things. But because we have been online because now I know how to teach online. Now I know how to do a Zoom classroom. We managed to have class anyway. Right. And it was really, really fun to be able to see each other's faces and to be able to get together in community. Um, that's something I wouldn't have known how to do a couple of years ago, supporting my students is different. Now I have more ways to do it more ways to reach them. But I, I think overall it's that we were all, we were all tested and we are still being tested. We're all being challenged and that has made people realize just how hard it is sometimes to be a student. 

RPR:                 I think that's an excellent point. And I think especially because, you know, as faculty members, we weren't the typical students, we were a very different kind of population of students stereotypically than, than most of our students will be in our classrooms. But that doesn't mean that we don't see who they are or that we shouldn't see who they are. We, I think there was a lot of humanity that came out of the pandemic, as you said. So we could see into each other's homes, we could see, you know, struggles for resources or, you know, things like that. So I do hope that compassion grew. And I, I I've talked to faculty in, in different, not just my institution where they want to be more flexible and they appreciate that. But they're almost inundated right now of, you know, they're getting emails from students who are sick and can't come to class or students who are worried that they shouldn't be coming to class or in one case it rained. So they didn't wanna come to class. So that was probably an extreme example, but they desperately that the faculty desperately want to be there in flexible for those students. But they're not sure how to, with that inundation of information coming at them. Do you have any advice for those folks? 

CD:                   I think that boundaries are so, so important and that seems almost trite. Like people say that all the time. Right. But I think sometimes people think boundaries are incompatible with kindness when it, I think they are a prerequisite for it. So for example, I take weekends off from my work email. I communicate this really clearly to my students on my syllabus. We talk about it, I remind them and it means that I get some time to recharge so that when I come back, I'm able to really be present for them and everything that they need. It's a really simple thing, a change that I made and I hold it, I hold myself really accountable to make sure that I don't check my work email on a weekend because if I do, I'm just undermining my capabilities for the coming week. I think that I'm trying to think of another example of a really good boundary that I have. 

                        The email one is so big because it just weasels into every part of your life, right? And takes over as many hours as you, you can give to it. I have a really strong boundary about when I will and will not be in my office. It used to be that I was in my office all the time and my door was always open. And there were some really good things about that, but it was also exhausting. [00:27:30] I needed to reserve time for me to read, reserve time for me to prep, reserve time where I just wasn't gonna be interrupted where my colleagues didn't need things from me as chair. So closing my office door now and again, or staying home for a morning to achieve things there before I go to campus, that has been super important to me too. I think deciding where you're going to carve out the spaces where you can thrive is a prerequisite for them being able to give your attention a compassion to others so that they can thrive. And the two can't be separated. 

                        I think too, as a chair, I would think that that also in some way, your colleagues see that potentially as a model. 

                        I know I have some colleagues who are not in my department. That's the thing with the liberal arts institution, right? Your department is not necessarily where your closest colleagues are. You have colleagues all over this institution, cause it's a much smaller environment. So I have other colleagues who definitely do the same thing that I do and really put these boundaries in place to make sure that they have the capacity to be there for their students. At other times, what's been most astonishing to me is how many of my students notice about the recharge days as I call them in the syllabus. So I have my students following the practice that recovery put together. I have them annotate the syllabus and a good to a half of the students, every term are like, this is a really good idea. I should do something like this. 

                        Right? And I always encourage them. Like you should do this. You should take time off from whenever the thing is that sucks up your time. Like email sucks up mine, right? It might not be email for you. It might be your a sorority. It might be your club. It might be going to the gym, whatever it is, give yourself time to recharge. Take that break. I did not expect that to be a side effect of it, but it's been really fun to see my students go wait a second and imagine if they get that habit when they're like 18, that's amazing right. For who they're gonna become. 

RPR:                 Yeah. And it's a reminder that we are role models for our students. They see what we do. If they see us running around hard and always busy and complaining about being busy, they think that's normal. Um, and they don't necessarily see how we live our lives in alignment or cohesion. When we think about our work life. 

CD:                   And I think that sometimes we have a drive to appear perfect to our students. Again, it goes back to that control thing, right? That we must be such a role, a role model in a very certain way. And I actually think it works better when we do let them see how messy things can get sometimes. So a great example is disappointing. I drove to campus and because of the snow, everything's super bright. So I had on my prescription sunglasses because it was so bright, I forgot to take them off and put my real glasses back on again. And didn't realize this till I was in my office and thought it's so dark in here today. By that point, it was too late to go back to my car. So I had to go into my classroom in my sunglasses and teach the entire class in my sunglasses. And so I told them what I did and they thought it was hilarious. Um, but it was very humbling for me to be like, here I am walking in as if this is gonna be a space that I have some control over. I, and I can't even remember to put the right glasses on, you know, it was great. 

RPR:                 I actually did that once too. I had to go to a meeting with my sunglasses on my colleagues said it was like being in a meeting with Bono. 

CD:                   I loved that, But it, you know, it was human. It was a real moment and yeah, it's what had to happen. It, you know, when we could connect over laughter I think, um, that we don't necessarily use that tool as much or um, not even use it as a tool, but allow it to bubble up naturally in our classrooms. 

RPR:                 Yeah. That's a really great point. Yeah. So thinking about pedagogy of kindness, how we can, you know, model, we can model boundaries. What are some of the ways that we can strengthen those, those impulses? Um, as we think about our peers or how we can support our peers as well, 

CD:                   I think for all of us like anything, it comes down to practice. You have to heat something. I have a friend who's very fond of talking about. It takes 12 days to make a habit. I don't know how many hours it takes to make a habit out of going to compassion first, but it is a practice and it takes practice. And I think that in constantly doing that, we are modeling to our students. We're modeling to our colleagues. We're supporting our colleagues when they do the same thing. Talking about boundaries, talking about limits, talking about expectations with our colleagues, I think is really important work. Especially for junior colleagues, I have a number of junior colleagues who feel like they need permission to stop working. Feel like they need permission to turn off. There is no granting authority that can say that, right? There's no one they can turn to, to say like, can I just not do email tonight? And so being able to talk to them about like why I do it the way I do it and how I wish I had done it so much earlier, how much it would've benefited me. Those are such important conversations. And they have boundaries around things that I don't think to have boundaries around. Right? So it's a wonderful give and take, but I think that supporting each other and having those boundaries is part and parcel of then supporting each other and choosing to be compassionate. 

RPR:                 How do we better advocate for that kindness with our colleagues and our students? 

CD:                   That's a really great question because I don't believe in evangelicalism. I think it has to be by example. I think it has to be that who you are changes as you find the groundedness of always going to compassion. And I think that the conversations you have change and who you are in the classroom and changes and who you are outside of the classroom changes. And I think those things spark more conversations. I also think that not everyone can talk to every person. So I think it's pretty well established in faculty development that whatever your particular talents are, they're never really recognized at your own institution, right? This is true for so many people I know who are in faculty development, 

                        But that's fine because if people at your own institution are like, eh, you are just, you're just Bob, you're just Jane, right? What do you have to tell me about anything? Someone else somewhere is saying the things that they really need to hear. And so I think that the ways that we network and communicate the Twitter conversations we have, right. I may be reaching someone who has a neighbor down the hallway. Who's been doing this for years, but they just can't see it because of familiarity. So I think that we build webs of support across distance as well as up close and personal. 

RPR:                 Yeah. One of my burnout resistance pillars is connection. Something that we can lose very quickly and that, but that we connection is connection to our students, connection to our colleagues connect. We connect to friends and family differently, but we do still build relationships. And how do we, how do we support those relationships? How do we actually build the relationship? Not just assume it's it exists for some, because it exists student in location or geography or something like that. How do we build those networks that support us? 

                        That's a really big principle at the Bright Institute is that at most liberal arts colleges, you're the single person who teaches your thing. So if you are a professor of early American history, it's unlikely that there's an another professor of early American history at your college. So we get really isolated and we get cut off and we don't have the same kind of funding to be able to go to conferences and workshops. And so one of the things, the Bright Institute does is say, here's a cohort for you. Here's a group of people you can be in fellowship with for the, the next three years. And beyond that, like the first cohort of the Bright Institute, those are friendships that are gonna last for such a long time, but that was important. The connection part of it was so important to thinking about what would make the Bright Institute tick. So yeah, I really think that's a really smart observation. 

RPR:                 Yeah. So in wrapping up, is there any kind of advice that you have for women in higher education specifically connected to kindness? And we haven't said vulnerability, but we've talked about maybe showing a little bit of that in, in class or having that be part of your, your kind of presence with your, with your students, especially, do you have any advice for folks who might want to dive more deeply into pedagogy of kindness or kindness in general in higher ed, especially for women? 

CD:                   I think not to sound like a broken record, but I think having strong boundaries is the thing you've got to have to be able to do all this other work, especially for women just as for women, men and trans, and non-binary individuals of color. You get asked to do a lot more informal work and emotional labor than some of your colleagues and it can be exhausting. So doing this kind of care work, I think has to be built on an understanding of your own limits and your own gifts. And so making those boundaries learning when to say no and how to say no, um, someone that I really respect Beth Godbee says, if it's not a strong yes, it's a no, right. That was transformational for me when I was sort of learning how to put boundaries in place that really help me stay connected and joyous in the classroom. I think those are really important. It is. We are socialized as women to give and give and give and care about people and do the emotional labor of the birthday cards and the play dates and everything else. Right. And so I think learning how to be able to put a clear boundary and say, this is what I will do. And when I will do it, then gives you the space and energy to be able to do all that wonderful care work. That is so important. 

RPR:                 I think that's a wonderful piece of advice to leave us with today. Thank you so much for chatting with me. It's been lovely getting to know you and, and just seeing honestly, seeing you light up when you talk about students and, and your love for, for your colleagues. So thank you for being here. 

CD:                   Thank you so much for having me. This was such a delight. 

RPR:                 Thanks for listening to this episode of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. to make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode, a transcript and show notes at theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.