Pedagogies of Care Spring 2025 Lunch & Learn Recap

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For the last three semesters, LILE has coordinated a Pedagogies of Care Lunch & Learn series, building on the pedagogies of care 2023 Emerging Pedagogies Summit panel. We recognize “pedagogies of care” as a broad umbrella which could encompass many topics. The talks from Spring 2024, Fall 2024, and those presented in this summary blog, have created a community at Duke around pedagogies of care, enforcing the idea that they are the foundation on which other emerging pedagogies must be built. The principles of pedagogies of care direct how we create equitable learning experiences. 

During Spring 2025, we were fortunate to host three different sessions that covered new topics, demonstrating the innovation and attenuation to care at our own institution:

Recognizing our Learners’ Humanity in our Instructional Design

Dr. Kisha Daniels, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Education and Faculty in Residence at Alspaugh Residence Hall, shared valuable insights on recognizing and supporting the humanity of learners. The session emphasized the importance of understanding students’ holistic experiences and brain development to create more empathetic and effective teaching strategies.

Daniels began by discussing the Faculty in Residence program, which allows faculty to live in residence halls and support students academically and personally. This unique position has given her a deeper understanding of students’ lives outside the classroom, influencing her approach to teaching and assessment. She explained, “It led me to think a little bit more about the differences between adolescent brain development and adult brain functioning and led me to think about how can I revise, edit, restructure my instruction as I learn more about my students…”

A key takeaway from the workshop was the importance of leaving space to build relationships with students. Daniels shared practical strategies, such as asking silly questions and using humor, to create a welcoming and supportive classroom environment. She emphasized that building connections with students can help them feel more engaged and supported in their learning journey.

Another significant point was the need to keep compassion and empathy at the forefront of assessment and instruction. Daniels highlighted the academic and personal challenges students face and how understanding these challenges can lead to more thoughtful and flexible assessment methods. She stated, “They’re trying really hard to show up, but they’re not getting the empathy and or compassion on the other end. And I found that once I started seeing how much other stuff students have going on in their lives, it’s helped me to redesign and rethink about how I assess students’ knowledge in a course.” 

Daniels also discussed the concept of risk versus reward in learning. She explained that students often avoid taking risks due to fear of failure or negative consequences. To address this, she has designed her courses to offer frequent opportunities where risk equals reward, encouraging students to be more creative and authentic in their learning.

The session concluded with a discussion on the importance of collaboration and authentic participation in the instructional process. Daniels shared her experiences developing courses that involve students in the design and evaluation process, referencing Students As Learners and Teachers (SaLT). This practice helps foster a sense of ownership and engagement.

In centering humanity and empathy, Daniels reminds us to “leave space to build relationships with your students,” and those relationships are “paramount to having a really thoughtful experience here at Duke and feeling connected.” Thoughtful instruction begins with care built into the curriculum. 

You can learn more about empathy in instructional design by reviewing the transcript of the session.

Bridging Research, Teaching, and Program Building across Divided Legacies at Duke University

Dr. Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Associate Professor in the Departments of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Art, Art History and Visual Studies, and Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program, shared her experiences navigating the various parts of the university system, specifically at Duke where she came right after graduate school, as a way to illustrate challenges and possibilities for the pedagogies of care.

Kwon began by describing the “one body problem” — the fact that faculty members only have one body but are asked to do three different jobs simultaneously — teaching, research, and service — that require very different skills and personality traits. She explained that you have to figure out where the priorities lie, acknowledging that for tenure track faculty it is, by default, research.

“But for those of us who are minorities, women, underrepresented groups, who are coming into a primarily white institution as Duke was and still is, our students are hungry for the type of work and the mentorship and teaching that we do,” she said. “And so when we come to the university as one of the only bodies that look like us in our fields, our disciplines, in our departments, there’s a lot of demand on your time. Especially in teaching and mentorship.” 

Kwon worked on how to bridge the divides between service — including mentorship — and teaching with the traditional focus of research as well as creating community “when there was none or very little.”

The first example Kwon shared was the effort to build the Asian American & Diaspora Studies program, which was established in 2018. Beginning with the history of Asian students at Duke, Kwon shared that this history went back to the early years of Duke’s establishment. From her collaborations with Duke library archivists over the years, Kwon learned that a small number of Asian students, particularly international students, attended Duke since its earliest days. 

Tracing the subsequent histories of Asian and Black students at Duke throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the broad local and global civil rights and decolonization movements that crystallized in the 1960s in her talk, Kwon discussed how, compared to other U.S. institutions, Duke’s history of establishing ethnic studies programs, including Asian American studies that taught about these long-standing local and global histories, was slow — even as the population of Asian Americans increased until these students were the largest minority group on campus in the 1990s. 

In the 2000s, students challenged the administration to create faculty and administrative positions that would finally establish majors and courses. Despite her own academic training not being in Asian American studies, Kwon said she felt a “deep sense of obligation and responsibility” to help these students who came to her for support. When the Asian American & Diaspora Studies program was finally established after over two decades of activism, it was because the interests of staff, faculty, and the administration had finally aligned.

“It’s still an ongoing project,” she said. “There are a handful of us now [working for the program while working full-time in our own home departments]. … But it’s been an amazing experience overall.”

The second example Kwon shared was the collaborative effort from a faculty working group to design the University 101 course: The Lived Experience of Race and Racism, which was first taught in 2019.

“Like the Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program, it was a bottom-up grassroots effort,” Kwon said. “Several of us faculty got together right around [the] time when we were having all these racist incidents on campus … we basically formed our own working group and we asked [ourselves]… what can we as faculty do … in this climate. And, of course, the students have been very active … and we wanted to support [their efforts].”

The faculty group created a full proposal that included several aspects, including more faculty hires on these topics and a draft syllabus of what would become the University 101 course. The initial idea was to use the Duke archives to tell the story of race at Duke through a multi-coalition, intersectional lens. Kwon clarified that it is not that these types of courses did not already exist but rather that this working group proposed a university-wide course that would link across various departments and communities, with the support of the entire university behind it.

“And so that [was also] a really exciting opportunity for communities to think about how to build coalitions, create solidarities … and learn from each other,” Kwon said. 

From both the founding of the Asian American & Diaspora Studies Program and the University 101 course, Kwon said she learned you can:

  • Do a lot to build momentum with just a handful of people.
  • Get people on board if you have a vision and frame it inclusively.
  • Work across disciplines and hierarchies along with faculty, staff, students and the administration, and — when the stars align — you can build amazing outcomes.

You can learn more about how to bridge divides and build community by viewing the recording of Kwon’s session below:

Feminist Pedagogies of Care for Teaching Global Health

For our third session, Dr. Aunchalee Palmquist, Associate Professor of the Practice at the Duke Global Health Institute, with a secondary appointment in Cultural Anthropology, shared her background, research, and teaching practices and how they all pull from and honor feminist perspectives.

An important grounding theme throughout Palmquist’s talk was that of systems thinking. A quote that really captures this idea as it relates to global health is when Palmquist asked, “Why is poverty associated with poor health around the world? Should we be wealthy to be healthy?”

When she approaches her research, she pulls from a number of grounding frameworks. These include feminism, reproductive justice, climate justice, intersectionality, and understanding structural violence. These broad reaching frameworks exemplify how she is constantly using systems thinking to interrogate power structures and push back against historical canons in Global Health that leave out voices from many different identity groups and perpetuate inequities. As Palmquist put it, “How can we possibly answer [the question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’] when we are not including all of the different diversities of what it means to be human in our analyses?”

Palmquist then moved into considering how inequitable power dynamics show up in our classroom norms and models and what practices she uses to avoid perpetuating harm caused by continuing legacies of oppression. One of the first things she does is introduce herself to her students. But in addition to situating them to her disciplinary orientations and knowledge, the perspective she brings in her design, what they will be learning, and how their learning might be different in her class compared to others, she is also purposeful about sharing her identities and cultural background. This practice helps her students see her as a fully formed human and invites students to show up in their humanity as well.

Some of the other practices Palmquist uses to rethink power in her classes include:

  • Designing the syllabus to be a care document that outlines how she aims to include a diversity of voices in her content, bring students in as collaborators, and build a relationship of trust in the class.
  • Using a diversity of innovative assignments that provide multiple ways of learning, flexible participation, accommodations without stigma, all resisting punitive logic.
  • Being transparent when course content might be difficult, pulling in trauma-informed pedagogical practices.
  • Using creative ways to teach and learn, including embodied learning, Indigenous ways of knowing, recognizing the humanity behind data, circle discussions in class, and more.

Palmquist ended by modeling her inclusive practices: “Good Medicine is a phrase commonly used in Native American and Native Hawaiian cultures to describe anything that promotes health, healing, and wellbeing. It’s a term that encompasses physical, mental, emotional, spiritual aspects of health… So I think about the work that we do as instructors, as teachers, as co-learners in classroom settings, as one of the things we can do to make good medicine in this world, and I feel like we need that now more than ever.”

You can learn more about feminist pedagogies of care by viewing the recording of Palmquist’s session below:

Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more about empathy in instructional design, here are some resources to get started:

If you’re interested in learning more about bridging divides and building community, here are some resources to get started:

If you’re interested in learning more about feminist perspectives on pedagogy here are some resources to get started:

LILE also has a guide on how to Create an Inclusive and Equitable Course, which includes further resources. This guide should not be used as a checklist but as a starting point of how you can rethink your course design. 

If you’d like to talk to a LILE expert about pedagogies of care, you can contact us at lile@duke.edu or visit us during office hours.