Current Book
Fall 2024 Office of Teaching and Learning Book Club
During the Fall 2024 semester, the OTL Book Club will host a book club to discuss A Pedagogy of Kindness (Denial, 2024). Book club discussions are open to all University of Guelph faculty, staff, and instructional staff (including sessionals and teaching assistants). At each meeting, book club members will take part in a facilitated discussion of one chapter of A Pedagogy of Kindness and discuss your thoughts, questions or share experiences from their own classes.
About A Pedagogy of Kindness:
Academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Individualism and competition are what count. But without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways.
Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just “getting along,” instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion—for students as well as for themselves.
A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive. (From the publisher’s description ©2024 University of Oklahoma Press)
Book Club Schedule
Book Club members will meet six times during the Fall semester, all on Thursday mornings. Either in person or virtually. Between meetings, book club members can also participate asynchronously through discussions and sharing resources on the Teams site.
| Date | Time | Discussion |
| Thursday, September 19 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Introductions, building community (no pre-reading) |
| Thursday, October 10 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Intro. and Kindness Toward the Self |
| Thursday, October 24 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Kindness and the Syllabus |
| Thursday, November 7 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Kindness and Assessment |
| Thursday, November 21 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Kindness in the Classroom |
| Thursday, December 5 | 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM | Conclusion and wrap-up |
Accessing the Book
A Pedagogy of Kindness is available as a hard copy, Kindle edition, or e-book. The McLaughlin Library has e-copies of the book available for Book Club members. Hard copies of the book are also available from Chapters Indigo, Amazon, and some independent bookstores.
Register for the Book Club
Book club meetings will take place in-person in Day Hall 209B and simultaneously via Microsoft Teams. Registration is limited to allow for effective discussions. Registrants will receive an invitation to the Teams meetings in advance of each meeting. Register below for the A Pedagogy of Kindness book club by September 17th. Space is limited.
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