Compassionate learning design as a liberating praxis: stories from learning designers around the world

Abstract

The goal of liberating learners, educators, educational developers and other stakeholders within higher education from systemic oppression and institutional injustice is unattainable if we consider social justice, well-being, mental health and care/compassion separately. As a collective, we developed a model for compassionate learning design, which is composed of four dimensions: participation, justice, and care, leading to a critical compassionate learning design praxis that itself comprises the fourth dimension. In this article, we select four representative equity-oriented learning designers/educational developers from among 30+ we interviewed in 2022, seeking to identify examples whose practices aligned with elements of our compassionate learning design model in various contexts worldwide. We also explore 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 were able to offer and nurture in those around them, an important expansion of our original model.