EP 32 - Pedagogy of Kindness: Fostering it Online with Cate Denial

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Cate Denial, author of “Pedagogy of Kindness” about kindness to self and students in the online classroom. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Guest Bio:

Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Her new book, A Pedagogy of Kindness, is now available from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her historical research has examined the early nineteenth-century experience of pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing in Upper Midwestern Ojibwe and missionary cultures, research that grew from Cate’s previous book, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country (2013). From July 2022 to December 2023, Cate was the PI on a $150,000 Mellon-funded grant bringing together thirty-six participants from across higher education in the United States to explore “Pedagogies, Communities, and Practices of Care in the Academy After COVID-19.” Cate consults on teaching in higher education with individuals, departments, and institutions in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.

Connecting with Cate:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-denial-8869a115b/
• https://bsky.app/profile/cjdenial.bsky.social
• https://catherinedenial.org/

• Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection (free access)
• A Pedagogy of Kindness (book)
• Michelle Miller’s post on Same Side Pedagogy
• Rethinking Rigor (Kevin Gannon)
• Annotate Your Syllabus (Remi Kalir)
• Digital Pedagogy Lab 2025

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

False Start

[00:00:00] Jason: good Well, thank you. Yeah, that was a great conversation

[00:00:02] Cate Denial: Yeah. Let me know, you know, if you need anything from me and otherwise I'll look forward to listening in when you get it all done.

[00:00:10] Jason: Okay, our our timeline is usually somewhere between two weeks and six months

[00:00:18] Cate Denial: Okay.

Start

[00:00:19] John Nash: I'm John nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:22] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning, the second half, the Online Learning Podcast.

[00:00:28] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but. A lot of it still isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage?

[00:00:43] Jason: That's a great question. How about we do a podcast, John, and talk about it?

[00:00:48] John Nash: I think that's a perfect idea. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:00:51] Jason: Well, today we have a special guest with us. With us is Catherine Denial. Cate is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. Welcome, Cate.

[00:01:07] Cate Denial: Thanks for having me.

[00:01:09] Jason: Can we call you Cate?

[00:01:10] Cate Denial: Of course.

[00:01:12] Jason: Sometimes I take that liberty when people have that on their little thing in the video screen.

I say, well, if it's there, then I guess we can call them that.

[00:01:20] Cate Denial: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:01:22] Jason: Yeah. Well, good. Well, it's so great to have you here. One of the reasons why we reached out to you is because of your book, which we'll get to. But even before that , in the spring of this last year, so I've got a digital critical pedagogy book club that we started in the spring.

So. There's a great anthology that you're part of that talks about the pedagogy of kindness as part of that anthology the Critical digital pedagogy anthology. We'll put the link in our notes. I got to know you're writing there and then of course connected through LinkedIn and Always great to see your posts.

I feel like they are kind of North Star-ish posts and I and I like following people who who helped to kind of bring me You bring me back and keep me pointed in the right direction with all of this because you can get really, really in the weeds and also caught up with all the new technologies and everything like that and what we're doing.

So anyways, that was kind of my background of connecting with you. And so thank you so much for coming on to the, into the show. I just really look forward to having this conversation and have been looking forward to it ever since we set it up.

We're going to get into your first chapter here in a second, but I would like to talk to you a little bit. We would like to talk to you a little bit about just kind of how you got to the place that you are today as as a professor and maybe a little bit about what, It kind of drew you to, to write this book and to kind of take this kind of trajectory, I think, in terms of, of your focus in this direction.

[00:03:06] Cate Denial: So it has been 30 years. I am from England originally. And so I showed up in America to go to graduate school and was put in front of a classroom. And I had graduated exactly 1 month before that because the British system goes longer into the year than the American system. was terrified. I didn't know what I was doing. So I projected Dana Scully every time I walked into the classroom from the X Files to try and make sure that I was someone who could actually command some kind of presence in that room. I was taught as a graduate instructor to think of students as antagonists, to suspect them of cheating, to watch out for their plagiarism, to think about the way that they would try and change their grades, to anticipate they wouldn't do the reading. People are very familiar with these sorts of things. And it quickly became clear to me that this wasn't working for me. And it wasn't working for my students either. Setting up that kind of antagonism in the classroom just put us all on edge. So little bit by little bit, I tried things to change. try and change that relationship. I was really flying blind for a great deal of time. I did not know there was such a thing as pedagogy scholarship. I had no idea about the scholarship of teaching and learning. I was just experimenting in my classroom. And then when I became a professor. I was a much better than I had been in 1994.

Thank goodness. And that trajectory continued and

To conduct myself in a classroom. I was trained in intergroup dialogue as of 2013 from the University of Michigan and intergroup dialogue is a really structured way of talking across big differences around issues like race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability. I have colleagues at Knott's College who were part of my journey alongside me, my colleague, Gabriel Raley Carlin, my colleagues, Hilary Lehrman and Deidre Doherty in particular. And then I went to the Digital Pedagogy Lab in 2017, and that was really where I had this aha moment where the people in charge of my stream asked us to look at our syllabus and to identify who we were writing it to, to literally describe them with a bunch of adjectives. And I realized, despite all the changes that I had made in my teaching, that syllabus communicated that I was a distant authoritarian figure just waiting for people to mess up. that was a shock to me. So I set about completely changing that, right? Going into the granular detail of my syllabus, changing the way that I expressed myself and the things that I asked students to do with the goal of making the self that I presented to them the same self that I am. Right. And so that was really how I got to distilling a pedagogy of kindness. It came very, very directly out of that digital pedagogy lab experience.

[00:06:13] John Nash: I'd like to build on that. Cate, I was I, I don't know where this is written somewhere, but it's about the, about the hook. And when you start a book or anything, it's like, you need to capture the reader in the first place. sentence or paragraph and yours did just that. I even texted Jason when I started reading your book saying, I'm on the Kindle version,

"I'm 4 percent in and I'm enthralled." And so

um,

Um, You

to get towards kindness. And it's what struck me was also, we talk a lot about, in this podcast with others, about building capa