Fostering Self-Knowledge & Self-Empowerment in Students: Using Compassionate Pedagogy
In my inquiry I am examining how fostering self-knowledge within my students and within myself as a teacher helps to nourish self-empowerment in everyone involved. Throughout my teaching experiences, I have found that by implementing compassionate teaching practices, trauma informed practices, and mindfulness, that these approaches have greatly assisted my students in their ability to be open to learning. In David Chudnovsky’s article, ‘The Great Schools project: How good is our School? How Can We Know? Our Schools/Our Selves” (2005) he asks:
“…surely schools need to be assessed, to a great extent, on the value of the immediate experiences they provide for students. Are the students happy and do they feel fulfilled at school? (…) …Do students get the opportunity for experiences that inspire their imagination, compassion and interest?” (p.29). To me, Chudnovsky is really raising the question, what is valuable knowledge for students to learn? Could teaching students self-knowledge and self-empowerment be more important to help students to grow, learn, and adapt in the real world, than just standardized learning and testing? It is my belief that self-knowledge, confidence, social skills, and inner peace, as encouraged through compassionate pedagogy and mindfulness, are very important types of knowledge that students will be able to use their whole lives. Chudnovsky goes on to say,
“…there is a tremendously wide range of outputs that are ignored by those who push the “standardization agenda”. That’s partly because it’s hard to figure out how to assess things like critical thinking, aesthetic and cultural sensibility, problem solving, self-confidence, sense of self in historical, geographic, social, class, gender and ethnic context, vocational readiness, emotional resilience, social solidarity, community responsibility ,media and computer literacy, democratic citizenship, etc.” (Chudnovsky p.28). I would argue that the skills and types of knowledge that Chudnovsky just listed are just as important, if not even more important, than the standard types of knowledge students are being tested on. For example, if a student has no self-knowledge or self-confidence, yet is full of the standard types of knowledge and intelligence, there’s still a good chance that they will fail in life, because confidence and self-love are key to success.
Author Heesoon Bai, in her article ‘What is inquiry?’(2005), suggests that by looking “…inwardly into one’s own thoughts and feelings, while facing the world” (p. 47) that our self-understanding and self-knowledge can help us to not only better understand our practice as teachers, but to reach our students as well. In Britzman’s article, ‘Teacher education in the confusion of our times’, (2000) the author states, “The work of knowing the self entails acknowledging not just what one would like to know about the self but also what is difficult to know about the self …”( p.202). Britzman also discusses the importance of self-knowledge for the teacher and also for the student. She suggests that as teachers we should “assume a certain dignity within vulnerability, that children were becoming adults but that they were already, like adults, humans (…) she wanted us to consider something difficult: the meeting of adults and children as an ethical obligation yet to be accomplished.” (Britzman p.202).
Since 2009, I have worked as a self-employed Art Coach at my business Chloe Ulis Art Coaching. I’ve enjoyed exploring what types of lessons can help to encourage self-knowledge, self-confidence, and creativity in my students. I have discovered how creative blocks can be overcome and how a student can be nurtured to become more confident in art making. I discovered the benefits of positive reinforcement & strengths-based critique, and I’ve seen how the artistic journey can bring about profound personal transformation. In my own art practice, I have explored how art can become a vessel that expresses and acknowledges the self on a deeper level.