In Search of Critical and Strategic Pedagogies of Compassion: Interrogating Pity and Sentimentality in Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter joins discussions concerning education as a means of cultivating compassion and pays explicit attention to the emotional complexities of teaching for/with compassion in higher education. Two challenges in these efforts are first, the strong and often discomforting emotions on the part of students and second, naive and superficial emotions of sentimentalism on behalf of students as responses to others’ suffering. The chapter explores the conditions within which compassion in the higher education classroom can be translated into protest at injustice and suffering or transmuted into action that radicalizes solidarity. For this purpose, I propose the notion of critical and strategic pedagogies of compassion, that is, critical pedagogies which interrogate the trappings of narratives of naive sentimentalism and seek to make a concrete difference in sufferers’ lives. Critical and strategic pedagogies of compassion examine how compassion may become both critical and strategic in opening up affective spaces which might eventually disrupt discomforting or naive feelings.