Kevin M. Gannon

“This litany of problems and obstacles both faculty and students face on a daily basis seems designed to instill despair, not hope. Indeed, a weary cynicism is both an eminently understandable and frequent response to these conditions. But jaded detachment, tempting as it may be for no other reason than self-defense, is ultimately a trap— one into which we’ll drag students along with us if we fall.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“The need for a fundamental sense of compassion has never been more visible than in our current higher educational context, where institutional resources and morale decline as the diversity and needs of our student population increase. To reverse what’s become decades’ worth of starvation budgets and an increasingly hostile political-cultural environment for higher education, we need to build a future radically different from our present. The work we do with and among our students— teaching and learning, creating and collaborating, building knowledge and burnishing confidence— is also the work of building that future. But that future can only come to pass if we involve as many students as possible in its creation. A future that’s shaped by processes that push significant numbers of students to the margins is one that will end up depressingly similar to our present. To militate against this outcome, we ought to begin dismantling the systems that marginalize our students. That’s a practice that starts in our own classrooms, in the routine choices we make every day about how we engage with our students and their stories— about what we say to them. An approach that embraces empathy and compassion as its default orientation is foundational to a pedagogy of radical hope.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto