Joy-Centered Pedagogy in Higher Education:

Uplifting Teaching and Learning For All

To access and download the OER for this book, click this link.

Readings and Questions for Reader Reflection

Chapter 1: Introducing Joy-Centered Pedagogy

• Where have you felt the most joy in a classroom? (How was your teaching and/ or learning affected by that positive emotion?)

• How do you define “rigor?”  Does your definition rest on the assumption that learning should be painful? 

• What forms of unlearning might you need to engage to create more joyful learning experiences? 

Readings and Questions for Reader Reflection

Chapter 2: Disrupting the Culture of Fear: Finding Joy for Students and Educators in a K– 12 Setting and Its Implications for Higher Education 

• What are some “fear factors” in your current position? 

• How do you tend to respond to this fear? 

• How are these fear factors discussed in meetings and with other faculty members? What is in your control to adjust? 

• If you teach at the college level, where do you see the legacy of the high school fear culture manifesting in your students? 

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Chapter 3: Transforming Trauma: The Joy of Student- Written Stand- Up Comedy 

• What disciplinary course structures and ‘traditional’ content exist in your field that could be ‘hacked’ (reframed) to be more student- centered? 

• In what ways might success be measured differently in your course? (How might you design assignments, articulate expectations, and evaluate assignments to convey to students that they are ‘good enough?’)

• How might you convey that the external performance of course outcomes is separate from their worth as human beings? 

• How might you encourage the interplay between authentic resilience, confidence, and agency? 

• What do you need to unlearn or resist for these changes to happen? (Perhaps this might include interrogating your own sense of what it means to be a ‘good enough’ teacher.)

• How might you create opportunities for open- ended/ emergent outcomes and/ or play in your classroom? 

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Chapter 4: Choosing Joy over Dread: Bringing Art, Playfulness, and Agency to Learning 

• Based on the case studies presented, what challenges do educators face today and how might these challenges be exacerbated by the various positionalities and professional roles represented? 

• How might incorporating restorative and creative activities in teaching development programs help educators enhance their ability to meet student needs? 

• Consider the impact of incorporating ABP in adult professional learning contexts, particularly in promoting reflection, empathy, and collective growth. How might the experience of professional learners differ from student learners, if at all? 

• Consider how aspects such as cultural background, previous educational experiences, and personal challenges shape your perspectives, goals, and approach to learning. How might recognizing and exploring these influences contribute to your growth and development as a graduate student and future professional? 

Deep Dive-Chapter 2

Deep Dive-Chapter 3

Deep Dive-Chapter 4

Deep Dives are audio overviews created with NotebookLM and are meant to support the reading, not replace it.

Session 2 Recording-Chapters 2-4

Readings and Questions for Reader Reflection

Chapter 5: Joyful Justice 

• Does the pressure to perform “expertise,” “professionalism,” or commitment to “rigor” get in the way of joy? What are the costs of this? Who pays these costs? 

• Where can you create opportunities for “micro- compassions” in your classroom? 

• Observe who speaks most in your classes, and who speaks least. Do the patterns of voice and voicelessness reproduce injustice? Do they invite joy? 

• How can you make space for emotional reactions while admitting that feelings may be “real but not true”? 

• How can you create opportunities in your classes for students to “say yes”; to feel good, relieved, hopeful, or alive? 

• What are you afraid might happen in your classrooms if you open the door to joy? There are real risks of microaggressions as well as microcompassions; what’s the plan for these? 

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Chapter 6: The Joy Is in the Inclusive (Teaching) Journey 

• How and when might you implement structured activities for you and students to learn each other’s names and get to know one another? 

• What structured inclusive strategies can you integrate to help you become a student of your students? 

• How can you help students recognize the value such inclusive strategies bring to their own personal learning and growth? 

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Chapter 7: Struggling Together: How Activating Student Resilience Promotes Joyful Responses to Computer Coding Challenges 

• What invisible barriers can you imagine your students encountering in your class? 

• What steps can you take to cultivate a culture of collaboration (“struggling together”) in your class? 

• In what ways can you “set the table” to invite joy into your classroom while remaining open to the organic and sometimes unexpected ways joy can emerge? 

Deep Dive-Chapter 5

Deep Dive-Chapter 6

Deep Dive-Chapter 7

Deep Dives are audio overviews created with NotebookLM and are meant to support the reading, not replace it.

Readings and Questions for Reader Reflection

Chapter 8: Re-membering: Personhood, Joy, and the Body in Education 

• Are there ways I unconsciously perpetuate biopolitical relationships with my students through my classroom expectations for “discipline,” “rigor,” or obedience? 

• How do I intentionally create opportunities for students to connect course materials to their own lives, experiences, hopes, and aspirations? 

• How often do I check in on how my body is feeling before, during, and after teaching a class? 

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Chapter 9: The Joy of Embodied Learning 

• Catalog the ways that you already leverage embodied learning in your classes. How might you enhance transparency and reflection around those activities to help learners appreciate their value? 

• Ask students how they would like learning to feel. How might you connect your pedagogies and practices to those outcomes? 

• How might you invite students to check in with how they’re feeling? 

• How might you design learning experiences that activate multiple senses, movement, and a variety of affordances? 

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Chapter 10: The Joy of Unlearning Failure to Promote Student Resilience 

• What kind of relationship do you have with failure? 

• How might you share your own “recovery from failure(s) story” as a model for students to emulate? 

• How might you create a supportive classroom community that can disrupt “shame spirals” with joyful authentic (vulnerable) connection? 

Deep Dive-Chapter 8

Deep Dive-Chapter 9

Deep Dive-Chapter 10

Deep Dives are audio overviews created with NotebookLM and are meant to support the reading, not replace it.

Readings and Questions for Reader Reflection

Chapter 11: Overcoming STEM Imposter Syndrome through Joyful Curiosity 

• What curiosities motivate your learning? 

• Where do you experience awe in your discipline or research? How might you share that with your students? 

• What does inquiry look like in your discipline and/ or pedagogical practice and how can it be intentionally supported through joyful curiosity? 

• In what ways can awareness of imposter syndrome, especially for first- generation students, be fostered? 

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Chapter 12: Celebrating Silence: Making Space for Quiet Joy in the Classroom 

• What have your experiences with silent spaces in the classroom involved, as an instructor and as a student?  (What biases, either for or against classroom silence, do you carry? )

• When is a time you remember feeling joyful in total silence? What did that period of silence allow you to subsequently do (or avoid doing)? 

• What is the time- breakdown of your class agenda? How much time are you talking as the instructor and how much time are your students talking? How much time is reserved for quiet contemplation, reflection, or silence? 

• What are some good disciplinary- specific prompts that could be used in the first silent 10 minutes of your class to foster subsequent engagement? 

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Chapter 13: Embracing Anger to Find Joyful Agency: Experiments in Communal Vulnerability 

• When you feel anger or frustration regarding student behavior or missing submissions, what might that emotion be signaling about your own “heartbrokenness” or sense of professional burnout?

• What “invisible agreements” or institutional expectations of “rigor” are you currently prioritizing that might be distancing you from your students and capping the potential for joy?

• How might you create space for “communal vulnerability” by occasionally pausing your pre-planned curriculum to sit with students and engage in shared healing rituals or recovery circles?

• In what ways could you co-design your physical classroom space with students—incorporating elements like music, snacks, or art—to make your collective presence and joy tangible?

• Following the principles of “Emergent Strategy,” what prevents you from having the courage to “Stop. Change.” when you recognize that your current instructional plan is not serving the humans in the room?

Deep Dive-Chapter 11

Deep Dive-Chapter 12

Deep Dive-Chapter 13

Deep Dives are audio overviews created with NotebookLM and are meant to support the reading, not replace it.

Session 5 Recording-Ch 11-13 

Readings and Questions for Reader Reflection

Chapter 14: We Don’t Have to Be Heroes: The Joys of Pedagogical “Quick Wins” and Community to Disrupt STEM Instructor Burnout 

• Do you feel external measures of success (security/ tenure and promotion) are at odds with your internal sense of joy and peace? 

• If you are a faculty member, how would you characterize your departmental culture? Is it conducive to joy? 

• Are you feeling burnout or grief? (If so, where is that coming from?) 

• Do you have a community of joyful support that allows you to both bear witness to problems within your institution and seek solutions? 

• What do you need to improve your access to a community of support? 

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Chapter 15: Joy: A Compass through Failure 

• What have you failed at? 

• What were you trying to manifest? 

• What “went wrong”? What “went right”? 

• How are the answers to those questions within your control? How are they beyond it? 

• For what might you feel grateful in this experience of failure? 

• How might joy help you maintain focus on core values in the face of operational failures? 

• Are you willing to keep failing? 

Deep Dive-Chapter 14

Deep Dive-Chapter 15

Deep Dives are audio overviews created with NotebookLM and are meant to support the reading, not replace it.

Session 6 Recording Ch 14-15