In the new NetVUE volume, Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good, Meghan M. Slining’s chapter, “A Case for Compassionate Pedagogy: Caring for the Public’s Health, Cultivating Sustainable Vocations,” argues that our compassion can keep students engaged during difficult times. Compassion is a way of being with suffering that allows us to see, hold, and acknowledge suffering, while also compelling us to take actions towards reducing it. Slining suggests that training and skills related to compassion can help reduce burnout and support sustainable vocations, which are important for the longevity of caring for the common good. Slining notes that this compassion extends not only to those we serve or the external world but also to ourselves. Within both my previous clinical work and my current teaching, I have been interested in self-compassion, but only recently have I begun to see its intersection with teaching vocation. In this post, I will share how the psychological literature defines self-compassion, my observations of self-compassion (or the lack of it) in students, and where self-compassion and vocation intersect.
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