Courageous and compassionate teaching: international reflections on our responses to teaching geography during the pandemic

Abstract

This paper reflects on what we learnt about teaching geography during the COVID-19 pandemic. We interrogate how we, as geography educators working in different contexts, navigated the novel teaching spaces created during the pandemic using two key registers; courageous and compassionate pedagogies. Our premise is that understanding in more nuanced form the approaches we took to creating courageous and compassionate education during the pandemic may help geography educators to thrive when delivering future-facing education. Our approach was to write and share vignettes of our pandemic teaching upon which we (asynchronously) collectively reflected; creating emergent themes described in this paper. This approach to structured peer learning derives from our commitment to education as a collective endeavour. We argue that the disruption caused by the early pandemic required geography educators to focus attention explicitly on areas previously taken as given. Geography educators slowed down by: (1) recognising educator and student embodiment in a novel context; (2) prioritising listening, acknowledging and sharing with students; and (3) paying attention to and respecting difference amongst learners and colleagues. We propose that consciously adopting these approaches will support geography educators and their students in rapidly changing circumstances across educational, employment and climate contexts.