Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education

Paul Gibbs is Director of Education Research at the University of Middlesex. He is a professor of the University, founder of the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Open University in Hong Kong and the University of Cyprus. He is an educator and researcher, having taught notions of transdisciplinarity alongside social realism and Heideggerian hermeneutics, and has over thirty successful transdisciplinary professional doctorate students. He has published twenty books on topics ranging from the marketing of higher education to vocationalism and higher education, and has published more than eighty academic articles. His particular approach to transdisciplinarity that informs his work is through the works of Heidegger, neo-Confucian thought and the insights of Basarab Nicolescu.  He is also the series editor of SpringerBriefs on Key Thinkers in Education and Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives forSpringer Academic Press.

“The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education, Gibbs collects diverse ideas about compassion in higher education. This volume can serve as a guide, for individuals and institutions alike, for an engaging historical and topical conversation on the wide-ranging ways to integrate ideas of spirituality and humanity into realms that have increasingly come to seem consumerist.” (Matt Kubacki, Reflective Teaching, wabashcenter.wabash.edu, July, 2018)

• Acknowledgements.- Introduction: Higher Education: A Compassion Business or Edifying Experience? Paul Gibbs.- Section I Thinking About Compassion and Education.- Compassion in Philosophy and Education, Richard White.- Pursuing the Aim of Compassionate Empathy in Higher Education, Bruce Maxwell.- Creating Conditions for Compassion, Kathryn Waddington.- Section II Expanding Compassionate Perspectives.- Intercultural Compassion in Higher Education, Irena Papadopoulos.- Compassion in Buddhism and Islam: The Liberal Arts and Living a Meaningful Life, Derek Maher.- Compassion in the Context of Higher Education in South Africa, Labby Ramrathan.- Confucian, Compassion (Ren) and Higher Education: A Perspective from the Analects of Confucius, Ka-wai Tong.- Compassion in Islam, Abdullah Sahin.- Section III Compassion within the Being of a University.- On Becoming a Campus of Compassion, Nancy Billas.- Learning About Consequences Community Creativity and Courage: Cultivating Compassion in Higher Education Leadership, Marilee Bresciani Ludvik.- In Search of Critical Strategic Pedagogies of Compassion: Integrating Pity and Sentimentality in Higher Education, Michalinos Zembylas.- When Looking is Allowed: What Compassionate Group Work Looks Like in a UK University, Theo Gilbert.- The Reflective Paradigm in Higher Education and Research: Compassion in Communities of Learning, Mary Koutselini.- All Together Now? Jacqui Boddington, with a experiential account by Sandip K. Gill and Alina Ursuleanu.- CODA, Paul Gibbs.