Leading assessment with kindness creates a holistic approach

What does it look like if we center compassion in our teaching? Dr. Cate Denial, PhD will share her ideas around this question and challenge us to scrutinize the way we usually think and talk about student assessment at her upcoming keynote address. 

The University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching will take place in the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning from April 28 to 30. Denial, who is a history professor and author of A Pedagogy of Kindness, will be the keynote speaker on the first day of the conference that will offer presentations, workshops and talks that focus on ‘reassessing assessment in postsecondary education’. 

Denial’s in-person keynote address is made possible through sponsorship provided by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary. She offered a moment to answer questions related to her research and themes her talk will highlight on April 28.

Tell us a bit about who you are and your area of research/interest.

I'm a history professor. My historical research focuses on marriage, divorce, pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy among the early 19th century Ojibwe in what we currently call Minnesota, as well as among the missionaries who moved to live among them. 

I love paying attention to the minute and intimate details of relationships, and how they challenge, reshape, and reflect the larger pressures of imperialism in a period when Americans were first showing up in the region. 

I'm also deeply immersed in thinking about teaching; both how to teach history and how to teach across disciplines. I'm focused on teaching with compassion; both toward our students, and toward ourselves.

In what way is a pedagogy of kindness important to the future of post-secondary assessment?

Kindness should stand at the heart of all we do in post-secondary education, including assessment. In our early years in post-secondary education, we're often socialized into a punitive, inflexible, and even draconian approach to assessment. I certainly was! I was never encouraged to take the whole student into account, to actually listen to what students were saying about assessment, or to think creatively about the assessment process. We can do so much better. Assessment can be holistic, generative, and forward-looking.

What does reassessing assessment in post-secondary education mean in the context of your focus area?

Many people have memories of pretty brutal history classes where they were asked to memorize a lot of dates and spit back a lot of facts on midterms and exams. That's not how I teach history, nor how I assess it. 

I want students to come away from my classes with a range of historical-thinking skills: the ability to find good sources of information from the time period they're looking at, contextualize that with critical studies from the present, and analyze both to sift through the creators' perspectives. I want them to remember big themes and categories of analysis, and to have some fun with history.

So, my assignments ask students to think about the significance of what they've learned, and to engage in metacognitive work about their own education.

What can conference attendees expect from your presentation?

My presentation offers a mix of things: reflections on being a teacher (who is still learning!); the ways in which compassion has become more and more important to me as a person and as an educator; and examples of what "teaching with kindness" means.  

People will leave with concrete suggestions for how to amplify the kind practices they already have, and to adapt their teaching to make room for even more.

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Registration is now open for the in-person conference taking place at the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning from April 28 to 30.

Check out the rest of the keynote speakers and stay tuned for the full schedule.