Pedagogical Love in Student-Staff Partnerships

Abstract

Higher education practitioners play a pivotal role in shaping learning experiences for undergraduate students. The co-curricular opportunities crafted for students can provide alternative pathways for consciousness-raising that deepens through the relationships established between staff and students.  This paper takes up love as a pedagogical tool to cultivate and sustain student-staff partnerships.  Love is an oft-undervalued component of these relations. From a feminist perspective, gendered norms and patriarchal values have trivialized the role of love in society (hooks, 2000). The authors of this piece have traversed many roles within their relationship as student/staff in a living-learning community, researcher/participant in a dissertation study, and friends. We have collectively developed more critically oriented views of the world over the last five years of our relationship. Learning and growing as we go, multiple traumas established love as a force that provided the necessary support to grow as women, learners, and leaders. Centered in this growth and healing is an ethic of care and an embodiment of pedagogical love. To frame our understanding of love, we turn to the work of bell hooks (2000). Love is not simply an emotion but our behavior; it is action-oriented. Through love, we show compassion, and through love, we determine what is just, fair, and right. Love is not contained within a singular definition but is understood through what it affords. In defining the many facets of love, hooks (2000) conceptualizes seven tenets: 1) affection, 2) respect, 3) recognition, 4) commitment, 5) trust, 6) care, and 7) open and honest communication. In this essay, we explore the application of these tenets to student-staff partnerships. We recognize the mutuality in this process, to both give and receive love, and apply these tenets from a student and staff perspective. For example, we see respect as honoring each other, and we actively recognize the knowledge, experiences, and perspectives each person brings into an educational space. In addition to the tenets established by hooks (2000), we offer the inclusion of vulnerability and open-mindedness to cultivate consciousness-raising in student-staff partnerships. Through this reflective piece, we hope to encourage the further application of pedagogical love to student-staff partnerships in higher education.