Towards a compassionate learning design

Over the last few years, Maha, Nicola and I have been grappling with the idea of designing for compassion. Our engagement with compassionate learning design started with a thought experiment: frustrated with the concept of empathy in design thinking, i.e., the assumption that we can put ourselves in somebody else's shoes, we experimented with replacing empathy with compassion. Drawing from the work I did in my PHD, where I looked at the potential of digital storytelling, to facilitate an engagement across difference and where I used Boler's concept of witnessing, or compassionate listening, to emphasise the importance of recognising how we are differently positioned when listening and responding to stories of others, and in particular for those in privileged positions, to take accountability and responsibility for our own role in somebody's else's story.

‘[compassion] goes beyond the feeling-for or feeling-with an individual and moves towards understanding the social and political structures of our society. This then is much more than ‘putting oneself in the other’s shoes’, but assumes responsibility for one’s own role in somebody else’s story. It creates urgency for practice, for action.’ (Segal, 2007)

Our conversations led us to our compassionate learning design model, which consists of three dimensions:

• Increased participation of learners and other stakeholders in the design process
• Justice, which we define as an understanding of how power, history, and positionality affect our ability to participate and a concern for equity in our design processes
• A recognition of the importance of care

Together, these three dimensions, we argue, can lead to a critical compassionate learning design praxis. By this, we mean a commitment to act reflectively (Freire, 1970/2000). This follows Curtin's understanding of compassion as "a cultivated feeling about emotion. It is a place where how we feel, how we think, and how we act come together. In other words, compassion is a cultivated practice, not an isolated, rational judgement about the world." (Curtin, 2014, loc. 1101)

We first wrote up our understanding of compassionate learning design in a chapter that became part of the edited collection "Towards a Critical Instruction Design" edited by Jerod Quinn, Martha Burtis, Suria Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa.

• Gachago, D., Bali, M., & Pallitt, N. 2022. Compassionate Learning Design as a Critical Approach to Instructional. In Jerod Quinn; Martha Burtis; Surita Jhangiani; and Robin DeRosa (eds): Towards a Critical Instructional Design. Pressbook. https://pressbooks.pub/criticalinstructionaldesign/chapter/compassionate-learning-design-as-a-critical-approach-to-instructional-design/

We then applied our compassionate learning design to our academic staff development practice during COVID-19 in the book "Learning Design Voices", edited by Tasneem Jaffer, Shanali Govender and Laura Czerniewicz.

• Pallitt, N., Bali, M., & Gachago, D. 2022. Academic Development as Compassionate Learning Design: Cases from South Africa and Egypt. In T. Jaffer, S. Govender & L. Czerniewicz (Eds.), Learning Design Voices. https://doi.org/10.25375/uct.20028431

In our most recent publication,  part of a beautiful special issue on Liberating Education in a Neoliberal Academy in the Journal of Learning Design in Higher Education, edited by Saima Shah, Barney Samson-Ledger, Cathy Elliott, Laurie Benson, Martin Compton, Rebecca Lindner, we applied the framework to analyse interviews we did in 2022 with equity-oriented learning designers and academic staff developers across the world:

• Bali, M, Gachago, D., & Pallitt, N. 2025. Compassionate learning design as a liberating praxis: stories from learning designers around the world. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE). https://journal.aldinhe.ac.uk/index.php/jldhe/article/view/1331/1087

In this article, we selected four representative equity-oriented learning designers/educational developers from among 30+ we interviewed in 2022. We sought to identify examples whose practices aligned with elements of our compassionate learning design model in various contexts worldwide. We also explored areas that appear in their praxis that diverge from or are not covered in our model. We discovered that although we did not directly probe participants on the four dimensions, they each had examples of the four dimensions in their practices. We also saw how each person’s positionality and environment influenced: the ways they practised social justice; with whom they were able to create participatory approaches; and the kinds of care they could offer and nurture in those around them, an important expansion of our original model. 

Our next paper "Compassionate Learning Design as an Approach to Critical Digital & AI Literacies", which is currently under review for an International Handbook on Reserach in Digital Literacies, edited by Jill Castek, Julie Coiro, Elena Forzani, Carita Kiili, Michelle Schira Hagerman, and Jesse R. Sparks, will apply the compassionate learning design model to our institutions' practices in developing critical AI literacies.

References: 

Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York: Routledge. 

Curtin, D. (2014). Compassion and being human. In C. J. Adams & L. Gruen (Eds.), Ecofeminism: Feminist intersections with other animals and the earth (pp. 39–58). New York, London, New Delhi & Sydney: Bloomsbury. 

Freire, P. (1970/2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group. 

Segal, E. (2007). Social empathy: A tool to address the contradiction of working but still poor. Families in Society, 88 (3), 333–37. 

Wehipeihana, N. (2013). A vision for indigenous evaluation [Keynote conference presentation]. Australasian Evaluation Society Conference, Brisbane, Australia. https://youtu.be/H6LXD3RjqLU