Friday 28 November (online)

Across higher education institutions, conversations about care and its significance are increasingly on the agenda. Concerns about wellbeing, about supporting diversity and inclusion, and about the will to foster educational experiences premised on belonging, connection and engagement, have meant that educators are frequently discussing approaches to education that prioritise practices of care. And yet, are universities really more caring places to work and to learn? At the same time as the proliferation of ‘care practices’, discourses that devalue and obscure educational and care labour within the academy, that prioritise educational efficiency dominate. Arguments that surfaced the gendered, classed and racialised practices of care, that exposed its situated material conditions, struggle to find a place in a marketized, individualizing, HE sector that is increasingly precarious. This keynote will explore these tensions, and examine what discourses of care are legitimised in contemporary higher education and which are silenced. Drawing on feminist and posthumanist ideas, I will seek to contribute to more complex meanings of care in the contemporary academy, arguing that care is not simply a warm and pleasant ideal; rather that matters of care can be understood as situated webs of relations and practices. I close by considering how we might generate broader ways of thinking about care, and how relational pedagogies might offer a means to foster more critical and caring ways of working, by encouraging us to notice our institutions and learning spaces anew.

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Associate Head (Research) at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education. She is a member of the Society for Research in Higher Education Governing Council, a member of the editorial board for Teaching in Higher Education, and Learning, Media and Technology, and Associate Editor for Sociology. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University. Karen’s latest books are: Gravett, K. (2025) Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Gravett, K. (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education.

Tuesday 2 December (in-person)

To some extent, the currently dangerous combinations of extreme competitive individualism – in politics, business and media – are not reduced by people and teams in those environments that have come out of the (also individualistically competitive) HE factory. But new ways of thinking and practice are emerging from the unlikely context of educating for compassionate student group/teamwork. The initiative is gaining strength from a fascinating and fast developing transdisciplinary theoretical underpinning.

Teaching and individually assessing not only both research skills and criticality but also, thirdly, the live use of smart compassionate communications in a final task focused group/teamwork meeting has had interesting results in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Life and Medical Sciences, and Law, at the University of Hertfordshire. Studies so far identify reductions in staff marking workloads, in unjustifiable awarding gaps (with statistical significance for individual critical thinking), in student-reported loneliness and disengagement, and in the inappropriate use of AI in assignments.   Professor Theo Gilbert will help demonstrate what the assessed micro skills of cognitive – not emotion-based – compassion mean and look like, practically, when a team meets, online or not.  You’ll see how surprisingly easy they are to teach and assess and where to get quickly accessible practical support for that.

Based within the Centre for Education and Student Success, Theo Gilbert, is a Professor or Compassion-focused Pedagogy, at  University of Hertfordshire (UH).  He is recipient of the Times Higher Education’s/Advance HE’s award for:  Most Innovative Teacher, 2018 and 2020’s keynote speaker for the sector’s National Teaching Fellows. Alongside his publications, he has a strong presence on this work, on YouTube. With a background in anthropology and Head of Complaints Investigation at St Thomas Hospital, London, his research on compassion has since translated rich, current scholarship on the cognitive nature of compassion into the applied context of teamwork management. This work is used in the public sector, for example, by the UK Police to enhance team cohesion and effectiveness across the country.  The Compassion in HE website welcomes colleagues to use and work with others from its free practical resources: https://compassioninhe.wordpress.com/   The website is supporting staff in 90 universities, as well as some FE colleges and schools.