ERIN LILLI, PhD

In my personal and professional life I value compassion, friendliness, understanding, and being approachable. In the classroom, these characteristics come through in my personality and teaching style where a blend of dry humor, upbeat energy, seriousness, and passion for the subject set the tone. From incorporating dialogue and activities into lectures, to drawing constructive connections between students’ discussion contributions, and including supportive and encouraging language in my syllabi, assignments, and written feedback; I work to bring that tone through the course. As an educator, one of my goals is to foster a judgement free zone (to the extent possible with a grade format) and present myself as somebody who is positive, approachable, and knowledgeable.

Care and empathy I’ve drawn on the traits of care and empathy to inform my teaching style, frame how I interact with my students, and structure my courses. I came across the concept of compassionate pedagogy (i.e., “teaching in crisis”) in the wake of COVID. While the term is somewhat new to me, upon reflection I found my approach to pedagogy to align with many of the practices in compassionate pedagogy. 

Interactions with students My interactions with students are polite and encouraging and I prioritize learning their names and addressing them by name. I often open class with a brief check-in by simply asking the students how they are doing and how their other classes are going—this is a way of reading the temperature of the room and adjusting the tone, energy, intensity, or schedule as needed. These actions are part of my broader efforts to center the students and demonstrate that their contributions are valued—even on occasions when they miss the intended mark . When facilitating class discussions, I connect across individual student contributions and put their ideas in conversation with each other. Similarly, I credit student assignment responses when they add relevant insight to our discussions.

I encourage students to share their ideas and opinions in so far as they are comfortable doing so in that moment—I tend not to call upon students nor put them on the spot by assuming they, in some way, represent the topic at hand. Different points of view are welcomed, and the diversity of our individual biographies can make for a rich discussion about urban life; however, this demands open-mindedness and mutual respect when sharing our viewpoints. A challenge with student engagement is in the balance between holding space for students to think and respond (i.e., sitting with some awkward silence) and when to step in and get the ball rolling. Increasingly I am learning to sit in that awkward silence when students are not readily speaking up.

These values and practices work to create a shared space of kindness and respect although they don’t guarantee a “safe” space in so far as we often engage with distressing or troubling social topics. Urban Studies is a critical, interdisciplinary field and as such interrogates issues that are highly politicized and at times polarizing.  Hate speech, racism, sexism, ableism, etc. have no place in our classroom and I have zero tolerance for behavior, from anybody in our classroom, which intentionally and with malice seeks to make a student feel unsafe, unwelcome, unheard, or offended.

Emotional labor I believe a pedagogy of care involves a degree of approachability, whether that be chatting with students after class or reminding them I am available for office hours. I often have students who are struggling with personal issues or negative living situations which can make focusing on one’s studies difficult. When a student is concerned about their capacity and prospects in the class, I strive to accommodate in a manner that is fair and extends their opportunity to succeed in the class. Students often use office hours to talk about personal issues or non-class related things and I handle this cautiously, but compassionately. I make it clear that I am not a counselor but do allow myself to be a sounding board or at least an adult who will simply listen and offer what advise I can.

Teaching through the lens of social justice, my goal is to develop my students’ critical thinking skills, expose them to new ways of understanding the world, encourage them to critique structures of power, and help them analyze the political-economic systems within which we live.

Expectations Setting and maintaining expectations is a two-way street between instructor and student that requires mutual responsibility to each other. My responsibilities include setting a positive tone, teaching with care and compassion, composing and abiding by a clear and informative syllabus, researching and delivering lectures, imparting learning objectives and goals, curating content from diverse sources and authors, providing vetted and free materials, taking care in choosing and writing assignments, providing tailored and detailed feedback, posting grades in a timely manner, making myself available for help, and implementing UDL practices. Students are expected to attend class sessions on time, pay attention during class, engage in class discussions and activities, complete assignments on time, and take ownership of their education.

Regarding “taking ownership of one’s education”, I believe it is incumbent upon each student to be proactive with their learning. By this, I mean students should be taking it upon themselves to speak up and reach out if they have questions or are struggling with the content. As a matter of routine, I ask my classes if they have any questions or “confusions” about the material, if parts of the reading were “fuzzy”, and I reiterate that they can email me if they need help.  

These setting and maintaining aspects mutually reinforce each other; however, there are cases when a student either can’t or won’t consistently meet some expectations. I have made changes to my course structure (see Flexibility and agency below) to build in some forgiveness, yet I still face a personal challenge in enforcing stricter policies, especially with respect to lateness. I am rethinking how I handle my open-door policy, in light of chronic and disruptive lateness, and should be careful I am not conflating a pedagogy of compassion with pleasing people.

Positionality/diminished hierarchy As an urban studies instructor, whose taught for many years as a doctoral student, I have found it helpful to put myself in the position of my students in two key ways: 1) as a co-learner recognizing the knowledge we all bring to the classroom through our own lived experiences and 2) in striking a balance between challenging and respecting our own capacities. Per the latter, I try to push students within a supportive context, one that gives them the space to, for example, grapple with a difficult text or theory without the unhelpful (and unrealistic) expectations that they completely grasp concepts right away lest their grade suffer. I believe there are instances when new information needs to be taken on board in a low-stress (some say “low stakes”) manner and given time to marinate to be better understood later in other relevant contexts. This provides a space for intellectual “risk-taking” (i.e., exposure to more complex and difficult material) and continued learning outside the classroom—both important for taking ownership of one’s education.

With respect to co-learning, many of my students are living the very subject matters we are studying; either in their daily lives as New Yorkers (e.g., as members of sexually marginalized and/or rent burdened, and/or immigrant communities) or through their jobs (e.g., working in city agencies).  I teach a variety of subjects and while I carefully research what I share with my students and am prepared to answer a variety of questions, I don’t claim to be an “expert”. I encourage my students to draw from what they already know and make educated inferences early in the learning process as a springboard from which we can continue.

By employing a co-learning approach in the classroom and embracing candidness I tend toward a diminished hierarchy between myself and my students. One of the challenges I have in creating a space of diminished hierarchy is the physical setting itself (e.g., doing circle seating) and developing a critical mass of student engagement. Too often it’s the same handful of students that contribute to class discussions.

Transparency/candidness With respect to a diminished hierarchy, it is important to find ways of connecting with students and I rely on a sense of transparency to do this. By being transparent or candid about my own analytical process and sense-making, I am using myself as an example to demonstrate that learning is ongoing (even after you earn a doctorate) and that professors aren’t static, all-knowing containers of knowledge. Furthermore, I want to impress upon my students that it is OK (and indeed necessary sometimes) to grapple with material and not fully understand something at first. I openly recognize that some texts are more complicated than others and I will explain why I assign certain content. As someone who started teaching college courses, as a change of career PhD student, I quickly found I was putting myself in the mindset of my students because in some ways I was actively learning the very material they were learning.

Flexibility and agency A pedagogy of care isn’t just for times of crises (e.g., COVID-19). As an educator, I recognize that my students often have economic, social, health, and family challenges in their personal lives that, at any time, could feel like a “crisis” in their world. Therefore, teaching from a place of compassion-as-pedagogy greatly influences how I designate student responsibility and maintain student expectations. Like several of my fellow instructors, I employ a forgiving schedule that allows students to miss a certain number of assignments before it negatively impacts their grade. Students can exercise agency if they have a difficult week and choose to skip that assignment—although I strongly encourage them to do all the work (but the points would max out). With this format I only accepted the first X number submitted as required by the syllabus. My logic here was to give students the choice to skip an assignment if needed in lieu of missing it and later asking for an extension.  Despite these efforts, many students still struggled with deadlines or had life circumstances that hindered their productivity leading them to still ask for an extension.

Implementing and tracking an ad hoc policy for late work became time consuming, stressful, and ultimately, I decided, not fair to myself or the rest of the class. To cope with this and maintain a pedagogy of care, I adapted the forgiving schedule to a more flexible, credit-based system. With this grading system I don’t accept any late work (except for documented extenuating circumstances), but I do offer more point-earning opportunities than the maximum required. This allows students who may do poorly on or miss an assignment the opportunity to still bring up their grade by taking advantage of all the opportunities available. I apply this format to homework and in-class assignments.

Fostering shared accountability Once I tried a group assignment and vowed never to try that again (for now that still stands although I’d like this to change). The amount of email communication with respect to some students not pulling their weight or being unreachable plus concerns about the group grade being dragged down created far too much stress and labor on both my part and the students’. For student-led discussion, I used to organize students into groups, each with a specific task and an independent grade and I would act as facilitator—the results varied across and within groups and ultimately I decided that a consistently high quality of class discussion necessitated a different approach and a pivot to in-class assignments with a discussion component.  Creating a shared sense of accountability among students is challenging and I believe this is partially because students don’t possess identical priorities with respect to the class. Currently, I offer a form of socialized extra credit that also serves as part of their participation grade. After each lecture, students take a 3-question “bonus” quiz about the lecture content—if the class average is high enough, then they earn bonus points added to an exam. Another way I foster shared accountability is through group reviews. For online course exam reviews, I break students into groups assigning each a topic list from the review sheet and ask them to define and describe each topic in padlet. This way they are all contributing to a fleshed-out review sheet through a division of labor—the better they work at it, the more robust their review is.

One of the challenges I work through, with respect to a compassionate approach, is creating boundaries around my time and emotional labor—and respecting those boundaries. I am willing to “go the extra mile” for my students (e.g., allowing multiple assignments to be completed near the end of the term to avoid an F, accepting late enrollments and catching them up, developing workarounds to accommodate student’s tech issues, allowing for alternatives to class oral presentations) and have found a sense of fulfillment in that willingness. However, in recent years I have been focusing on my mental health and asking if a “bend over backwards” style is really doing my students any service. In many cases I don’t think it is. This reassessing has made me question the sustainability of such an approach (especially when teaching four classes with over 130 students) and has led to changes in some of the policies and practices I employ.

Boundary work is an ongoing process for me, and I believe that with a pedagogy of compassion it is possible to reconcile fairness with personal accountability while maintaining the integrity of the course.