What I’m Reading: ‘Teaching With Compassion’

Peter Kaufman and Janine Schipper’s Teaching With Compassion: An Educator’s Oath to Teach From the Heart (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) is filled with creative ideas and exercises for building classroom chemistry and expanding one’s pedagogical tool kit. The book is about treating the classroom as a community and ensuring that no student is left out of the learning process. It’s about cultivating an inclusive space for students to grow intellectually and socially, and opening ourselves to understanding the hardships they may be experiencing.

A theme in the book is the importance of being fully attentive to our students. We expect students to listen carefully to us and recall what we say on exams. But, to borrow one of my favorite questions from the book: What if we were tested on how well we listen to students?

The authors remind us of why we were drawn to teaching in the first place: to connect with students on a human level and empower them to develop as students and citizens.

Kaufman, who was a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, was my longtime mentor and friend. He received a diagnosis of lung cancer in 2017 and died in November at the age of 51. I noticed that he always practiced the lessons that he and Schipper, a professor of sociology at Northern Arizona University, describe in their book: He was a kind, compassionate person who treated people with respect. He didn’t make a career in higher education to nourish his ego. Rather, he focused on the needs of students. He was a role model for all of us who teach college students.

Todd Schoepflin is an associate professor of sociology at Niagara University.