Abstract

We argue for and provide preliminary evidence supporting the efficacy of a pedagogies of kindness approach in tertiary teaching, especially for students that sometimes experience barriers to inclusion. Building on Cate Denial’s work, a kind approach to teaching boils down to believing students – and believing in them. We show examples of how to do this when writing syllabi and when emailing students. We also report on a post-hoc empirical analysis investigating the response and completion rates of 116 students receiving kind or alarmist emails. Kind emails resulted in much higher student response (57%) and completion (48%) rates compared to alarmist emails (16% and 22% respectively). We argue that our approach does not entail an extra burden for teachers, leading us to conclude that tertiary teachers should work kinder, not harder, to promote inclusivity and student success.

Keywords

Pedagogies of kindness, kind, inclusive, emotional tone, emails, syllabi

Introduction

Now more than ever, tertiary students face a huge range of pressures and distractions that can result in them disengaging from the learning process (Hari Rajan et al., 2024). On the frontlines of tertiary education, this disengagement is evident in increasing numbers of students not completing important assessment and learning tasks (Gerritsen, 2023). This non-completion is a significant problem for students and tertiary educational institutions because it can lead to students failing courses and dropping out without completing their intended qualifications. Many tertiary educators attempt to reverse student disengagement by emailing them. But all too often these emails go unanswered or even unread. For some students there are significant barriers that prevent them from communicating with teaching staff (McMahon, 2021). These barriers include negative past experiences communicating with teachers or authority figures, feeling like teachers don’t care about their situation, and feeling too anxious or overwhelmed to respond (Garrat, 2024; Vogt, 2021).

One way to overcome these barriers is to change how we communicate with students. Cate Denial (2019; 2024) has proposed a pedagogies of kindness approach to teacher-student interactions, which urges teachers to be kind to, and trust in, their students in order to help them succeed in our classrooms. In this chapter, we review this approach and report on our own applications of kindness in correspondence with students in history and philosophy courses. We report on how we changed the wording of our syllabi and emails to be kinder and on the proportion of students that respond to and later submit work after receiving ‘kind’ versus ‘alarmist’ emails. We reflect on what these preliminary findings suggest for how to communicate with students and the potential workload implications for teachers. We conclude that tertiary teachers should work kinder, not harder. For many teachers, a slight change in communication style could help struggling students overcome communication barriers and ultimately succeed in their studies. We argue this approach has value beyond increasing completion rates, as students appreciate being seen as full and complex people with lives beyond their role as learners. This approach also intersects with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, which emphasise making learning accessible for all at the outset rather than creating accommodations only when requested (Rose & Meyer, 2002).

We draw on our experiences as academic faculty in History (Stevens) and Philosophy (Weijers) at Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato/The University of Waikato. Our personal, institutional, and national contexts inform our experiences and pedagogy in important ways. As a regional university, Waikato has a high proportion of students who are the first in their families to attend university, as well as a diverse student cohort, with particularly strong enrolments from Māori and Pacific students (The University of Waikato, 2023). The University is located on the whenua (land) of Waikato-Tainui (the local iwi/Indigenous group) (The University of Waikato, n.d.). Aotearoa New Zealand’s history and present status as a settler-colonial nation, and its ongoing struggles for indigenous sovereignty, are reflected in the educational landscape. Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi, hereafter Te Tiriti) enshrines Māori rights, including to language and mātauranga (knowledge), but breaches of Te Tiriti since its signing in 1840 still cast a shadow over many aspects of contemporary life in Aotearoa New Zealand, including in educational contexts. The University aims to be a Tiriti-led institution according to its strategy (The University of Waikato, 2024), but is still in the process of identifying and removing the systemic racism that continues to shape much of the tertiary sector in Aotearoa New Zealand (Tiakiwai et al., 2022; Kidman, 2019; Smith et al., 2021).

In our experience, the combination of these factors can mean the University may not be a welcoming space for all students. Studying can be an alienating experience for some students, especially those that are new to tertiary systems (Foronda et al., 2025; Lessky et al., 2021). As McDonald (2019), Kidman and colleagues (2017), and others (e.g., Orón Semper & Blasco, 2018) have shown, knowledge of how educational institutions work is not evenly distributed, with a hidden curriculum of expectations, assumptions, and values. As Pākehā (European settler-descendent) faculty, we acknowledge the duty of academic staff to create a more equitable and inclusive educational environment, both in terms of a general moral duty and our obligations stemming from Te Tiriti. In the case studies discussed, we emphasise the importance of proactively promoting a pedagogy of kindness through our syllabi and emails as a way to create connections and reduce boundaries. This approach may be particularly effective when communicating with students who are feeling stressed or disconnected from their learning or the university, a group that is proportionally more likely to include Māori and Pacific students (Tiakiwai et al., 2022).

We start with outlining what a pedagogy of kindness entails, followed by two case studies of how we make this approach visible to our students: through our syllabi and our emails. As we will demonstrate, this approach appears to improve student success in terms of paper completion as well as creating a better sense of connection for students who have been struggling in some way. Across our teaching, we both adopt these approaches, but we each draw on specific examples from our own teaching practices in the respective case studies to illustrate these in more depth, with Stevens discussing changes to syllabi wording and policy, and Weijers discussing emailing non-submitters of assessments.

Defining kindness

Cate Denial provides a helpful definition of this approach: “in practice, I’ve found that kindness as pedagogical practice distils down to two simple things: believing people, and believing in people” (2019, para. 9). Denial explains that believing people is about trust: trusting students when they tell you something has gone wrong in their lives, rather than doubting them, and working with them to find a solution. Rather than an adversarial relationship, this enables students to engage more with us too, and problem solve about their learning; in other words, to have more agency and ownership in their learning. But the emphasis on learning and the expectations of quality work remain. This is the critical distinction between kindness and niceness. Niceness can be a ‘Band-Aid’, while kindness is “real, it’s honest, and it demands integrity” (Denial, 2024, p. 2). Believing in people is therefore believing in their ability to do the work, and to contribute actively to their learning (Denial, 2024). It does not mean a free pass to skip assessments or turn in low quality work.

It is also helpful to reiterate what a pedagogy of kindness is not. Kindness is not an antonym for rigor and will not result in students avoiding taking personal responsibility for their study. We still believe in our students’ ability to achieve the learning outcomes and we still require them to do the work to pass our courses. Kindness is also not about taking on more emotional labour. Trusting students allows us to respond quickly and kindly without the need to overthink the situation. We can easily include links to support mechanisms, such as mental health services, without feeling the need to provide those specialised services ourselves. A pedagogy of kindness is also not a waste of time and energy; as we will demonstrate below, believing students and believing in them can be fast and effective.

This definition also both highlights and counters the main concerns with the idea of kindness: firstly, that kindness means lowering our academic standards; secondly, that being kind might lead to students taking advantage of faculty to try and avoid doing the necessary work of learning. On the latter point, I (Stevens) was warned when I was first a teaching fellow to watch out for all the grandparents that would die when an essay was due, and not to be sucked in. While such statements may be said at least partially in jest, this type of warning reinforces the idea that we should view students with suspicion and distrust, and often circulates beyond the intended audience of academics (Bayer & Camfield, 2018). Citing a similar discussion at a chemistry conference, Cooper argues that while “some students do very little work, and some do cheat … to design instructional environments based on these outliers cannot be productive” (2012, p. 423).

The appeal of a tough approach may also reflect the inequities of whose expertise is recognised and valued in the classroom, with numerous studies showing that women and non-white academics receive harsher student evaluations (Chávez & Mitchell, 2020). In this context, maintaining an authoritative, even strict, teaching persona can seem like a solution. In the tertiary classroom Michelle Dion (2008) notes that women need to establish their presence as both ‘all knowing’ and ‘all nurturing’, providing suggestions like having clear but firm guidelines in their syllabi to help mitigate student biases. As Amy Hasinoff (2018, para. 16) writes of her own experience as an early-career academic: “rules and harsh policies seemed like a bulwark against the vulnerability I felt as a young female professor. Bureaucracy felt like a safety net. Rubrics and grades seemed to provide fairness, clarity, and control”. Hasinoff charts her journey to a more empathetic and trusting approach, including using student self-assessment in place of grading.^[1] Her journey reflects our own unlearning of a more authoritarian model of the teacher-learner relationship.

Though this pedagogy may be relatively new to us, it is not new. Rather, a pedagogy of kindness draws on practices many of us already use to some degree, as well as existing theories, primarily from decolonial and feminist educators. The earliest reference dates to the 1920s, when Eugene Bertram Willard acknowledged the importance of kindness to classroom pedagogy (Grant & Pittaway, 2024, p. 1). In other guises, scholars such as bell hooks frame this approach in terms of hope and love. hooks writes that “when as teachers we teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter” (2003, p. 135). By contrast, without taking care and teaching with love, she explains that we are “missing the most powerful experience we can offer students, which is the opportunity to be fully and compassionately engaged with learning” (hooks, 2003, p. 135). Tim Loreman (2011) similarly concludes that kindness forms an important part of love as effective pedagogy. Furthermore, as Clegg and Rowland (2010) discuss, kindness can be both commonplace and underacknowledged in tertiary teaching, while potentially subverting the neoliberal university’s expectation of performative care.

Approaches to teaching that emphasised kindness gained momentum in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdowns forced both faculty and students to rapidly and radically adjust their methods of teaching and learning (Denial, 2021; Gilmour, 2021; Langille & Kannen, 2020; Rawle, 2021). This disruptive period either necessitated or precipitated a variety of changes to long-standing models of tertiary learning. It was in this context that I (Stevens) encountered pedagogies of kindness, which resonated with the growing unease that I felt about a punitive and adversarial view of the teacher-student dyad. Reading Denial’s writing on Hybrid Pedagogy (expanded in her subsequent book) (Denial, 2019; 2024) both echoed and explained some of the dissonance I felt at this time, and that we (Stevens and Weijers) have since discussed together. The challenges and learning inequities made visible and frequently exacerbated during the pandemic highlighted the long-standing need for more inclusive university systems. As Lauren E. Stephens explains, COVID-19 “reemphasized that students are people first and students second” (2023, p. 136).

This brings us back to what a pedagogy of kindness looks like in practice, drawing particularly on Denial’s framework that we follow in the case studies described. We also build upon recent work on the possibilities and perils of implementing this pedagogy (Grant & Pittaway, 2024). So what does believing students, and believing in students actually mean in the classroom? At its core, most educators who are using kindness, practice trust. For example, if a student tells us that something has happened in their life – an illness, bereavement, or similar – that impacts their ability to meet a deadline, we believe what they are telling us, rather than police or interrogate them. This might mean providing an extension without requiring a medical certificate, which can be both expensive and difficult to obtain in a timely manner. Beyond trusting students, this pedagogy often means building accessibility into our teaching and assessment from the outset, using Universal Design for Learning principles, rather than offering accommodations only for students who have formally diagnosed and disclosed needs (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Kindness is part of creating what Peter Felten (2019) calls a ‘relentless welcome,’ acknowledging that a sense of belonging needs to be constantly created and reinforced for effective teaching and learning.

In adopting a pedagogy of kindness, we also acknowledge our position as Pākehā (white/settler-descendant) academics in Aotearoa. As Hirini Kaa (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu and Rongowhakaata) explains, the word kindness is culturally specific and not necessarily equivalent to manaakitanga, a te ao Māori term encompassing cultural and spiritual values and embodiment of welcome, connection, and indeed kindness (Kaa & Willis, 2021). In a period when Aotearoa New Zealand universities still have a long journey to achieve equity and Te Tiriti partnership, Western practices still dominate (McAllister et al., 2019; Naepi, 2019; Stewart et al., 2021). In supporting a move to more Te Tiriti-centred institutions, we believe that a pedagogy of kindness has value in creating more inclusive and accessible learning environments for our diverse student body.

Making kindness visible in academic bureaucracy: The syllabus

As the adapted adage goes, institutions can’t love you back, nor can they be kind. Our work of teaching and learning takes place in an institutional context that can be impersonal and challenging to navigate for staff and students. One of the questions underpinning our praxis is how to make a pedagogy of kindness evident for those who might need it. If kindness is about recognising the mutual humanity of learners and educators, how do we make this visible in the most bureaucratic of academic documents – the syllabus? As Denial explains, in her own teaching, “despite all the work I had done over the years to be flexible, creative, and inventive, and even generate fun in the classroom, that document [the syllabus] communicated nothing about those values” (2024, p. 9).

In our institution, the format and content of syllabi (or paper outlines as they are called at our university) are tightly defined, with set headings that must be completed, boilerplate text for certain policies, and limited scope for creative additions. The paper outline is quasi-contractual, in that teaching should not deviate from the plan and policies therein. The technology through which paper outlines are created adds to these constraints. Lecturers are required to populate a series of boxes and select assessment options via our learning management system, which are then compiled into a highly standardised paper outline. Within these boundaries, there is considerable flexibility within our faculty to define certain policies, including for extensions and penalties for late assessments. The result is a consistent format for students, though this itself may mean students do not always read the document in depth. Our institutional context and our own practice are thus some way from Jane Barnette’s (2022) manifesto that syllabi must be developed in conjunction with students, as the required syllabus templates and approval processes largely preclude faculty-student co-creation. Nevertheless, making kindness visible as a policy within the paper outline system has the benefit of making our classroom values clearer to our students.

In this example, we demonstrate how and why the wording around an assessment extension policy has shifted from 2019 to the present. I (Stevens) started at the University of Waikato in mid-2019, teaching for one semester before the pandemic. Initially I copied the extension and late submission wording from colleagues. This version, taken from the HISTY380-19B Paper Outline, embodies an adversarial view of students as potentially dishonest:

Request for extensions should be made to the Course Convenor via email (not just in person). Extensions will only be granted under reasonable circumstances (for bereavements, but not because a student has “had a hard weekend or night-out drinking” or “had” to attend a wedding or birthday function). Where a student has been, or is, unwell, a medical certificate should be provided. Extensions will be granted for up to one-week maximum if a reasonable explanation is provided.

Students also received grade deductions for each day of late submission without an extension. In practice, I (Stevens) was somewhat kinder: I didn’t require a medical certificate, knowing the wait times and cost involved. Nor was I particularly comfortable with the idea of requiring disclosure of personal health details. Why didn’t my syllabus better reflect my teaching values?

It was only after reading more about kindness as a pedagogy, as described above, that my (Stevens) policies evolved. Initially, from 2020, I removed the requirement for a medical certificate and the mention of mark deduction for late submission and increased the maximum extension to two weeks. I also explicitly added that students’ health problems could include mental as well as physical health: “Please note that your mental health is considered as important as your physical health!”. However, the comments about nights out drinking remained, traces of the earlier approach of suspicion that still permeated my syllabus and teaching.

By 2022, I (Stevens) rewrote the wording, offering an automatic three-day extension on larger assessments if requested and longer extensions based on a discussion of their circumstances and needs. As Weijers discusses in our next case study, this approach works best in combination with proactively reaching out to students who have missed assignments, something we both practiced consistently from before the pandemic period. An example of the current extension policy wording I use is:

Request for extensions for larger assessments should be made to the lecturer via email, and requested in advance of the deadline wherever possible. Extensions will automatically be granted for three days with a written request. Longer extensions will be granted under reasonable circumstances (such as for bereavements or illness) – please contact the lecturer via email to discuss your situation and needs as soon as possible so we can work on a plan together to ensure you can catch up and succeed. Note that your mental health is considered as important as your physical health!

In this course, students also have small weekly in-class assessments, of which the best ten count, so they can skip some weeks or complete an alternative if they will be absent for longer. In 2025, this wording was circulated as the suggested policy for syllabi in Te Kura Toi/School of Arts.

There is still scope to grow and improve both this policy and practice. However, feedback from students generally expresses gratitude, and indeed sometimes surprise, that we recognise their lives beyond the single course they have with us in a particular semester. More widely, this approach is more equitable. Scholarship by Hills and Peacock (2022) highlights that not all students know how to ask for extensions or other support or feel confident to do so. This type of knowledge is unevenly distributed amongst the student population, especially for first-in-family students (Tiakiwai et al., 2022, pp. 26–27). This is one of the reasons we advocate for syllabus text that makes visible our policies, along with proactive and kind contact with students who may be struggling and unsure about how to get help or what the reception might be if they do reach out, given their inexperience or negative past experiences with educational institutions. Building from UDL principles (CAST, 2024), this approach aims to make tertiary learning more accessible for diverse learners, by focusing on designing welcoming and inclusive environments and systems rather than addressing perceived ‘deficits’ of individual learners.

We want to stress that kindness does not require abandoning structure or limits. Indeed, clear structure can be beneficial for some neurodivergent students (Costa, 2022). We can be clear about which deadlines have some flexibility (realistically, all those essays cannot be marked the day after they are due) and which deadlines do not, like the end of semester deadlines that ensure grades can be finalised on time. This echoes Denial’s argument that being kind isn’t always nice: it can also mean having difficult conversations about student progress or generative artificial intelligence use, and having to advise that certain extensions simply are not possible.

In an era of ever-increasing academic workloads, these policies are also time-saving and thus also kind to ourselves as teaching staff (Borthwick et al., 2024; Rawle, 2021). We do not need to spend time and energy policing the extensions by requesting and reviewing medical or other documentation that can be both costly, and uncomfortable and difficult for students to access and disclose. Instead of policing funeral notices, our communications with students can focus on helping them learn the topics and skills we are passionate and knowledgeable about. Instead of the emotional labour involved in reviewing medical documentation we are ill-equipped to interpret, if students are struggling or behind, we spend this time working with students to help them catch up and succeed. Ideally, there would be a way to automate some of this within the learning management system to reduce administration. For example, if students could request and receive the automatic extensions for eligible assessments within the learning management system, without staff spending time updating due dates or manually adding extensions, those students who just need an extra day or so can proactively manage their workload while we focus on supporting the students who need more help with catching up on missed work. Staff could be notified the student had requested an extension and thus be in contact if needed. Such changes could free teachers from the role of administrator as well as disciplinarian, creating even more time and space for curiosity and learning instead of bureaucracy.

The syllabus creates a space to highlight our values in the classroom, and an acknowledgment of the student as a person. However, in practice, we have found that students’ expectation of a punitive response may be so ingrained that they still fear a negative response or grade penalty if they need to ask for more time on an assessment. For this reason, we argue that proactive and kind emails form a significant part of demonstrating a pedagogy of kindness to our students in practice.

A post-hoc empirical analysis of email tone

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I (Weijers) changed my teaching approach to include more pastoral care, flexibility with deadlines, and forgiveness of late penalties. This new approach included emailing students when they did not complete assessment tasks and offering to give them another chance. I noticed that many students did not reply or complete the work. While attending a presentation by Te Taka Keegan, winner of the 2017 New Zealand Prime Minister’s Supreme Award for Excellence in Tertiary Teaching, I was inspired to communicate these offers of help to students differently. Keegan explained that he used a kind, friendly emotional tone in his emails to students because they tended to respond more frequently and positively. Indeed, the literature stresses the importance of emotional tone in emails, especially for online teaching (Miller, 2020). I had previously used an alarmist emotional tone in my emails to students, thinking that it would help by shocking them into action. After discussing Keegan’s presentation with colleagues, I shifted to a kind emotional tone in the hope that more students would be encouraged to complete the work. It seemed to me that students responded more to helpful emails with a kind emotional tone than they did to the same kind of email with an alarmist emotional tone. However, it was unclear whether students receiving emails with a kind emotional tone were also more likely to complete the assessment. Since electronic records of all emails to students and students’ completion of assessment are kept, I could conduct a post-hoc empirical analysis comparing the responses and completions to test whether a kind emotional tone in emails predicted student engagement and success.^[2]

Hypothesis 1: Students are more likely to respond to helpful emails with a kind emotional tone than to similar emails with an alarmist emotional tone.

Hypothesis 2: Students are more likely to submit an assessment if they receive helpful emails with a kind emotional tone than if they receive similar emails with an alarmist emotional tone.

Method

From 2021-2024, I (Weijers) emailed students that had not completed one major assessment or several minor assessments 116 times (in two similar open-entry undergraduate philosophy courses at the University of Waikato; see Appendix Table 2.1 for more information). The emails were all sent within a week of the missed assessment/s. In all cases, the aim was to encourage students to complete work by offering to be accommodating with deadlines and to waive late penalties. The emails were worded with either an alarmist or a kind emotional tone.^[3] I coded emotional tone for the study. Table 2.1 shows some examples of the wording of email subject lines and whether they were coded as being alarmist or kind in tone.

 Table 2.1. Examples of emotional tone coding of email subject lines.
Note: A few subject lines are not reported here because they are nearly identical to one of the included examples.

I (Weijers) used Chi-Square tests of independence to examine the relations between the emotional tone of emails sent to students and the students’ subsequent actions. I analysed the data using Social Science Statistics Chi-Square Calculator^[4] and took the cautious approach of applying the Yates correction (Haber, 1982). Chi-Square analysis is appropriate because the data are frequencies of categorical variables of sufficient number per cell (see Table 2.2 and 2.3) (McHugh, 2013). Furthermore, the observations were independent because they were all individual emails, rather than group emails or conversations.

Results

The first Chi-Square test assessed the relation between whether students responded to emails written in an alarmist versus a kind emotional tone (Table 2.2). The relation between these variables was significant, X2 (1, N = 116) = 5.3, p = .0207. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, students were more likely to respond to kind emails than alarmist emails.

Table 2.2. Chi-Square data for student responses to alarmist versus kind emails.
Note: Results without brackets = observed frequencies or totals. Results in round brackets = (expected cell totals). Results in square brackets = [Chi-Square statistic for that cell].

The second Chi-Square test assessed the relation between whether students went on to complete assessments referred to in emails written in an alarmist versus a kind emotional tone (Table 2.3). The relation between these variables was significant, X2 (1, N = 116) = 14.5, p = .0001. Consistent with Hypothesis 2, students were more likely to complete the assessment referred to in kind emails than in alarmist emails.

Table 2.3. Chi-Square data for student completions related to alarmist versus kind emails.
Note: Results without brackets = observed frequencies or totals. Results in round brackets = (expected cell totals). Results in square brackets = [Chi-Square statistic for that cell].

The combined results are also shown in Table 2.4 and Figure 2.1 to aid in interpretation; 57% of students replied to kind emails, while 16% replied to alarmist emails; 48% of students receiving kind emails eventually completed the missed assessment, while 22% of students receiving alarmist emails did the same.

Table 2.4. Response and completion rates for emails with alarmist and kind tones.

Discussion

The results were consistent with both hypotheses, indicating that helpful emails worded in a kind way may be more helpful to students than emails worded in an alarmist way.

The large difference in response rates between alarmist and kind emails might be explained by the context of the students that receive the helpful emails combined with the way stressed people tend to respond to the emotional tone of messages (Thomas, 2021). The students who are thriving, or at least surviving well enough to keep on top of their current tasks, are more likely to feel relatively calm or respond to stress by proactively seeking help or pushing through the work (Richardson et al., 2012). These students do not receive the helpful emails that this study focuses on because they are completing the assessments on time. All the students that receive the helpful emails have fallen behind with the assessments and did not complete them on time. There are many reasons why students do not complete assessments on time, but some of the most significant include that they are very busy dealing with other assessments, non-study tasks, adverse life events, mental or physical illness, or a combination of these factors (Gregory & Morón-García, 2009; Nieberding & Heckler, 2021). As a result, many of the students receiving the helpful emails could be experiencing high levels of stress, with some feeling completely overwhelmed and possibly also ashamed of being overwhelmed (Kazlauskaite et al., 2025). When students are experiencing acute distress, reading an alarmist email subject line may trigger additional stress and possibly shame responses, making them feel less able to even read the body of the email (Thomas, 2021), let alone get to work on the missed assessment. Indeed, Richardson and colleagues (2012, p. 91) found that when students in their ‘just surviving’ category were stressed, they tended to avoid potential further sources of stress until they felt better. In comparison, an email with a kind emotional tone in the subject line and body is more likely to feel safe to read to someone feeling distressed. Notably, all the alarmist email subject lines mentioned failing or included an exclamation mark (see Table 2.1). The content of the alarmist email subject lines was also focused on passing or failing the course. In contrast, the kind email subject lines were focused on the student themselves and how they are doing, or offering to help them. Kind email subject lines could have helped students feel safe enough to read the email and, upon finding kind help and no negative judgment, feel safe enough to respond. So, the low response rate to alarmist emails may be partly caused by students not feeling safe enough to open the email, leading to non-responses.

The same reasoning might help explain why the completion rate was much higher for kind emails than alarmist ones. After feeling safe enough to open the email, students realise they are still permitted to complete the assessment and will not be penalised or negatively judged for completing it late. This creates a new and fairly attractive option for students, which seems to translate into a mental or explicit (e.g., in the response email) commitment to complete the assessment. Of course, not all students reading the email will make this commitment. Some of them will have already passed the course and view grade maximisation as a low priority. Others may have decided to give up on the course for reasons other than missing an assessment submission date. And, of the students that do make this commitment, not all of them will end up completing the assessment (perhaps because of new or persisting stressors). Nevertheless, it seems likely that kind emails are more likely to generate awareness of and commitment and action towards the opportunity to complete late assessments. Indeed, replies from students to the kind emails generally included surprise about the opportunity, gratitude for the support, a commitment to complete, or some combination of these factors.

Despite the highly significant statistical results of this post-hoc empirical analysis, caution is advised. The analysis was based on a relatively small number of emails and was not supported by demographic data. As such it is difficult to generalise from the findings. Furthermore, because this was a post-hoc empirical analysis, it was not possible to randomise between kind and alarmist tones for each course/year/assignment instance. As a result, confounding variables might be causing the differences between the response and completion rates to alarmist and kind emails. A follow-up survey might produce self-report data from students, indicating whether they thought the tone of the email made a difference. However, since some students did not respond to the email about the assignment, they may not be likely to respond to a survey invitation either, potentially limiting the usefulness of this approach. Despite these weaknesses, this post-hoc empirical analysis gives good reason to conduct randomised controlled trials in the future with alarmist, kind, and no email conditions, and perhaps with a follow-up survey about email-related feelings and behaviours and mental health and subjective wellbeing.

Reflections

The two approaches – kind policies in syllabi and kind emotional tone in emails – complement each other. By expressing a kind approach to students early and often during the course, they are more likely to understand that we will help them without judging them. Especially against a backdrop of teachers not always being kind and an institution still shedding its colonial past, a consistently kind approach may be required for any individually kind communication to be taken at face value. For this reason, all other communications with students, in-person and online, should express the view that the teaching staff believe in students and care about their experience and academic success. Kindness is an integral part of building relational and accessible pedagogies to help all learners, as advocated by UDL scholars (Rose & Meyer, 2002; Felten & Lambert, 2020; CAST, 2024).

Critics of pedagogies of kindness might argue that teachers do not have time to enact a pedagogy of kindness because they are already overworked and emotionally burnt out. We sympathise with busy and stressed teachers, and do not want to add to their workload. Indeed, our suggestion here is to work kinder, not harder. Many faculty members already do this, but a pedagogy of kindness ingrains these practices and makes them visible. Our work already requires that we communicate with students in multiple ways. All we are suggesting is that these communications are kind: that they come from a place of believing students and believing in them. Written resources that have an adversarial or alarmist tone can be rewritten in a kind tone whenever they are normally updated. This change may take a little time to think about and practice, but in our experience, it quickly becomes second nature and takes no extra time. If a kind approach to communication improves student outcomes, and does not take longer than less kind approaches, we should all communicate kindly with students.

Furthermore, even if future research shows that a pedagogy of kindness does not improve student completion rates, we still think educators should communicate kindly with students. Completion is not the only measure of success we have in mind. By seeing students as people first and learners second, we show our care for their wellbeing. Even if students do not end up completing the course, kind communication can help them feel better at the time and be more likely to study and reach out to lecturers for help in the future. The following email response shows how large an impact a kind word can have:

Thank You Dr Weijers for your concern. Due to unforeseen personal circumstances I have been unable to fully continue my university education since the teaching recess. […] I would like to thank you as during this time in my life you have been the only educator to reach out to me about assessments and offering help with them. I would just like to emphasize how much it means to students when an educator goes out of their way to try and help them. […] I wish you all the best and hope you continue to be as great an educator as you are right now.^[5]

References

Barnette, J. (2022). Reevaluating rigor with 2020 hindsight—A manifesto for the ungraded classroom. In J. Higgins & E. C. Halpin, Teaching performance practices in remote and hybrid spaces (pp. 11–20). Routledge.

Bayer, L. & Camfield, E. (2018, April 10). Student shaming and the need for academic empathy. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/student-shaming-academic-empathy/

Blum, S. D. (Ed.). (2020). Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead). University of West Virginia Press.

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Appendix Table 2.1. Response and completion rates for alarmist and kind emails (with contextual data)

Note. For ‘Assignment/time’, ‘Course’ means emails about missed quizzes, tutorials, or both. ‘Essay’ assignments always fell in the middle of the course. ‘Final’ assignments always fell at the end of the course.