More reading about mattering and care in higher education, inspired by the work of Gravett, Kinchin and others

I really enjoyed reading the Gravett & Ajjavi (2022) article on “belonging as a situated practice”, especially since I see a connection with other thoughts I am having on place-based learning (inspired for example by Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) and several of  Servant-Mikols works) that I cannot quite put my finger on yet, so it was a very easy choice which article of my ever-growing to-read list to get to next: Gravett et al. (2021) on “Pedagogies of mattering”. And from that, I went down into a rabbit hole…

As in their later article about belonging, Gravett et al. (2021) argue that while the current discourse on mattering, and teacher-student relationships more generally, are going in a good direction, thinking about them as just the relationship between individuals is not sufficient. For that, they use “posthuman theory”, which includes non-human elements, like for example the environment in which learning takes place, the hand sanitizer bottles or screens or positions we have to hold our bodies in due to furniture or cameras. They suggest to think of “learning spaces as something we do (stage, perform, enact), rather than something we have (infrastructure)”. We do set the contexts in which learning happens. Where should we teach? What does it do to students when we squeeze them into lecture theaters beyond their capacity, when there are no spots available in the library? Caring (or not caring) can also be felt by the availability of spaces and how they are designed and cared for (for example, I need to have plants in my office to be comfortable, and pictures on my blog. Yes, also online spaces are learning spaces!). The discussion of learning spaces reminded me of a presentation that I summarized here on the “importance of the room”, which was really the first time that I actively “consider[ed] the impact that material spaces have on teaching and learning”.

But of course, mattering is not only about the physical spaces, either. Gravett et al. (2021) introduce the term “response-ability” as an ability to respond which we can learn and practice, in contrast to classical  “responsibility”, which implies a power relation where someone can be, and take on, responsibility for someone else. I find this distinction so interesting and it fits so well with my current thinking about the implications of “inclusion”, that with the problem being that it is “done to someone by someone” (Hedvall & Ericsson, 2024). And, interesting side note: Of course, inclusion, or even nonclusion, is not always the highest moral value! We exclude criminals from public life by confining them to jail, we exclude some students from being admitted to studies based on grades, we are in exclusive romantic relationships (see Felix, 2024, for a really nice discussion). They also raise this point about caring: Who cares about whom? And what about the cleaning stuff who is doing the dirty work so our learning environment is taken care of?

And then, of course, who matters is also expressed through what content we teach. Learning outcomes, and with them what teaching materials we use, examples we mention, reading we recommend, are neither neutral nor objective, and definitely show whose voices matter. If student mattered, all of these could be co-created, negotiated and re-negotiated.

But let’s get back to the spaces in which we learn. I am reading this article on a rainy, stormy morning from the corner of my sofa, hence this featured image. But I also went and finally got myself access to the library outside of the times they have personnel there, because I am aware that mixing my space for recovery with my learning space is not a very good idea. My desk at work is surrounded by things that help me learn. Not just the plants for emotional well-being, but also a pin-board with lots of lovely notes that people wrote to me (both by hand and print-outs of electronic messages), pictures of people that matter to me, a mug with freediving pictures on it, postcards that I have designed, the books I have written. And I am thinking back to pandemic times, where a participant in one of the (online, of course) workshops I gave told us about an awesome project they had started (and here is Kiel University’s press release on a well-deserved teaching award they got for it, and a video summarizing the project (both in German, screenshot from the video below)): Regine Gläser and colleagues were sending out orange and scalpels to dermatology students to practice cutting and sewing in a material that (apparently?) feels very similar to skin, so students could gain authentic experiences despite being confined to their homes. Which made me think — we did a lot of those things during the lockdown so students could learn in their own spaces but still feel “professional” in some sense. But why did that stop after the lockdown? Why not give students periodic tables of elements, maps of the ocean circulation, other somehow discipliary relevant figures to decorate their home work spaces with if they so choose? About a decade ago, I stuck a piece of paper on a mirror in the bathroom at the institute, with lots of small notes saying “motivation, take some, it’s awesome”, that people could rip of and take. They were gone super quickly, and then I saw one, many years later, taped to a computer that Elin brought on a cruise! All that to say, even small changes to the learning spaces matter! So why are we still teaching in the rooms we are teaching in?

Screenshot of a youtube video showing how dermatology students can practice practical skills on oranges using a toolkit that was sent home to them during the pandemic

From that article, I found an article by Kinchin (2022) on “care as a threshold concept for teaching in the salutogenic university” (salutogenesis, as I found out thanks to google, is an approach to promote wellbeing by focussing on an ideal state of health). Maybe seeing care as a threshold concept that is, by definition, troublesome, challenging prior understandings, and when understood transformative, can help understand what makes showing care sometimes so difficult? Salutogenesis is one of the three components that they describe contribute to the ideal. Salutogenesis in the work place is about a sense of coherence, namely whether the environment makes sense and changes are explicable and predictable, whether there are sufficient ressources available to manage the demands of the environment, and whether the challenges seem subjectively worthy of investment and engagement. A second component is pedagogic health, which is described along the four dimensions of good discourses about teaching, authenticity of teaching and assessment, how teaching and research are connected and how that relates to teaching, and whether teachers feel that they can influence decisions about and management of teaching. The third component is then the connection to the articles I discussed previously, care itself. For care to be healthy, there is also a “need for teachers to have sufficient agency to know when to care and when not to care”, and also for teachers to care about their students, but also themselves. These three components obviously overlap, and Kinchin (2022) uses the image of the triple point of water (i.e. the point where water exists in gaseous, liquid, and solid form) to describe the point “at which the three components become indistinguishable– where care, pedagogic health and salutogenesis co-exist without borders or barriers”. This point, Kinchin (2022) aknowledges, might never be reachable, “an academic’s personal understanding of the concept of care evolves as the concept develops […], and it will be modified as it entangles with other lines– including pedagogic health and salutogenesis”. They write “I am working under the assumption that the act of revealing and articulating this mapping process represents a jumping off point for professional development through promoting enhanced agency”, and I feel that this is really the case for me — considering how I personally understand care, for myself, for others, and how this is entangled with the workplace and the teaching environment I am in.

In Kinchin (2022), I then found the reference to an article by Anderson et al. (2020) where they write about interviews with students that “although care was not the focus of the study, all cohorts of students represented care as a key marker of good teaching. They described good teachers as people who care about their discipline, care about teaching and care about students, powerfully influencing students’ engagement with subject matter, enthusiasm for learning and aspirations for the future”. Which is so similar to what Rachel, Peter and I find in Glessmer et al. (2024) that it feels embarassing to not have known about that article in time to cite it!

Ok then, last article summary of today, also found in the article this all started out from: Gravett & Kinchin (2020) write about teaching excellence. I have a quite ambivalent relationship towards “excellence” in teaching (I like the Lund model of teaching excellence as a model to reflect teaching, but not so sure whether what is measured in order to award the “excellent teaching practitioner” distinctions is actually measuring teaching excellence…), at the same time I find it interesting to discuss how we would identify really good teaching. But first: What I loved most about this article is that they use the analogy of “diffraction” (that I have many #WaveWatching posts on) as an approach to re-reading an older text: By approaching the old text with the new text(s) as wave front(s), we can observe the new text(s) wrapping around the old obstacle, and interference pattern (and maybe even shadow zones) emerging, these new pattern of understanding influenced by both the old obstacle and the new wave(s). Who doesn’t love a good physics analogy?

In the end, they re-imagine six older indicators to come out something like so (my interpretations):

1. Developing a teaching philosophy with the understanding that this is an ongoing process and there is no fixed endpoint, both because we don’t stop “becoming”, and because our teaching philosophy is influenced by, and in turn influences, the world around us.
2. Engaging in the struggles of our own educational values entangled in the real world’s circumstances and its responses (I really liked the metaphor of “knotworking” to describe the process of development impacted by, and resisting, changing pulls from all directions)
3. Again, understanding excellence as “becoming”, but with a clear direction and with knowing who we are and what we stand for (this reminds me so much of Timothy Snyder’s “don’t obey in advance”)
4. At an institutional level, there needs to be a culture of having conversations about a plurality of teaching approaches, theories, values, policies
5. Teaching excellence shouldn’t ask people to be heros, but we should provide the institutional conditions, in terms of spaces, policies, funding, etc., in which teachers can excell (and Kinchin (2023) suggests moves towards future universities that are less market-driven and more socially just, focussed on community and sustainability)
6. Teaching needs to be integrated with other aspects of our academic practice

So what’s the take-away from all this reading? I think, for me it is really about embracing, and working on, “becoming”, not just as an individual, but entangled in a messy world. It’s going to be interesting to go back to the office tomorrow to start of the work year 2025!

Anderson, V., Rabello, R., Wass, R., Golding, C., Rangi, A., Eteuati, E., … & Waller, A. (2020). Good teaching as care in higher education. Higher Education, 79, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-019-00392-6

Felix, C. V. (2024). A Critique of the Inclusion/Exclusion Dichotomy. Philosophies, 9(2), 30.

Glessmer, M. S., Persson, P., & Forsyth, R. (2024). Engineering students trust teachers who ask, listen, and respond. International Journal for Academic Development, 1–14. doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2024.2438224

Gravett, K., & Kinchin, I. (2020). Revisiting ‘A “teaching excellence” for the times we live in’: posthuman possibilities. Teaching in Higher Education, 25(8), 1028-1034.

Gravett, K., Taylor, C. A., & Fairchild, N. (2021). Pedagogies of mattering: re-conceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 1-16.

Hedvall, P. O., & Ericsson, S. (2024). The Problem with “Inclusion”? It Is Done to Someone by Someone. In Universal Design 2024: Shaping a Sustainable, Equitable and Resilient Future for All (pp. 18-25). IOS Press.

Kinchin, I. M. (2022). Care as a threshold concept for teaching in the salutogenic university, Teaching in Higher Education, 27:2, 171-184, DOI:10.1080/13562517.2019.1704726