LTA Connect: Compassionate Pedagogies - The role of compassionate leadership in supporting innovative teaching

Session Outline

Compassion is generally perceived to align with empathy, but recent research (c.f. Worline and Dutton 2017) has identified a 4-stage process that moves beyond this to noticing and taking action to alleviate suffering. Compassionate leadership therefore involves identifying and addressing areas which cause suffering at work. Part of this includes creating an environment of psychological safety, thus facilitating innovativeness and creativity. Compassionate pedagogies are creative and innovative and provide inclusive environments in which students can learn well and engage enthusiastically. In order to achieve this, however, compassionate leadership must first put in place the building blocks for psychological safety. This talk will therefore focus on the importance of compassionate leadership in our academic institutions and departments for the creation of innovative and inclusive teaching.

Presenter

Fiona Denney, Professor of Leadership and Business Education, Brunel Business School, Brunel University London

I am a Professor in Leadership and Business Education in the Organisations and People division in Brunel Business School and my focus is on human-centred leadership. My research interests are focused on hybrid management and compassionate leadership in organisations including universities and the not-for-profit and public sectors. I hold a BA / Leverhulme grant for a project investigating the role of hybrid managers in universities. I am always interested to hear from prospective doctoral students whose interests align with my research areas. In a career of over 20 years, I have been a business studies academic in the areas of marketing and general managment and leadership and I have held a number of central university positions. Between 2003 and 2019, I worked in academic staff and researcher development, including being the Assistant Director of the Graduate School at King’s College London and heading up the Brunel Educational Excellence Centre at Brunel University London until 2019. Both of these positions plus my national and international work for Vitae (see https://www.vitae.ac.uk) have involved me in strategic leadership and operational management including managing people, projects and resources, which now form my research interests in leadership. I served as a member of the Executive Committee of the UK Council for Graduate Education as well as the Honorary Secretary between 2017 and 2021. I am also a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). I am currently an external examiner for the University of Lincoln's College of Social Science Research Degrees Board and have served as an external examiner in many other UK universities including UCL. I am also involved in providing consultancy work for Epigeum - a major developer of online training programmes for the higher education sector owned by Oxford University Press. I am a qualified and highly experienced executive coach and I coach senior executives in professional services industries as additional consultancy work.

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