In mid-December, our first Rigorously Compassionate faculty cohort met with several students who had taken classes with us during Fall 2024. Our goal was to have a conversation across different courses and disciplines about how well our attempts to support students’ growth both as individuals and as accountable group members had worked out from our varied points of view. Courses represented were TD 312D Intermediate Contemporary Dance Technique (required in the BFA Dance Curriculum), MUS 213M Music History 1 and MUS 230L Music History 3 (required in the undergraduate Music Curriculum), and ENS 106M Mariachi Paredes de Tejastitlán (one of our most outstanding ensembles in the Butler School of Music).
Constructing Learning Communities of Care
One of the most meaningful aspects of our conversation involved our recognition that learning requires moving beyond a focus on one’s individual accomplishment. As one student observed: “I think the unique thing about [this] class was we sat down at the beginning of the semester and we talked about what it looks like to show up to class, ready to do class each day, what it looks like to have a successful class, not just as — I danced really well, but I took class and I learned something.” This focus on thinking about how we learn (metacognitive thinking) is a key part of what our cohort is trying to build.
This collaborative approach to establishing accountability frameworks reflects our project’s core belief that community care emerges through shared responsibility and ownership over the culture of a class, rather than top-down enforcement. As another student observed: “I feel like open communication starts from the very beginning… you have to treat your students like real people.”
Attendance – The Paradox of Choice and Accountability
Our discussion turned to how traditional attendance policies often perpetuate what one faculty member termed “cop shit” – where professors become enforcers rather than facilitators of learning. One student’s reflection was especially important: rather than viewing strict policies as ensuring engagement, they observed how more flexible approaches actually deepened their commitment: “When you have a lenient attendance policy, coming to class is a choice that the student makes… They’re making an active choice to go to class.” This reframing transforms attendance from an external obligation to an expression of agency and self-directed learning.
This shift in perspective illuminates a deeper truth about accountability in performing arts education. When students are given agency in their attendance, they must grapple with the real consequences of their choices – not just on their own learning, but on the collective experience of the ensemble or class. As one student noted about ensemble work: “You literally can’t be in ensemble if you’re not at rehearsal.” Individual choice and collective responsibility become inextricably linked. This reality creates a natural accountability structure that emerges from the process of creative work itself rather than from external policies.
Any classroom is ultimately an ensemble space, in which each individual depends on their collaborators – be they students or teachers – contributing to the energy of engagement that leads to the most nuanced learning. And the tension between individual accountability and group outcomes is real: as one participant noted: “I think especially for ensembles, it can actually be pretty tough… You have musicians working really hard and the person across the room is obviously not.” This reality demands a delicate balance between honoring individual journeys and maintaining each member’s accountability to the collective. While students have an important role to play in keeping each other accountable, they legitimately look to the instructor as the person with structural authority to ensure the cohort’s success.
Reimagining Spaces of Connection
Our conversation revealed deep-seated anxieties about student-faculty interactions and how institutional structures like office hours and email communication often carry unintended emotional weight.
The traditional framing of office hours as spaces for addressing problems creates what one might call an architecture of anxiety. As one student articulated with striking clarity: “Office hours have always been defined as something that you go to only if you need help.” Another suggested that they initially perceived office hours as “especially for students who are goody-two-shoes,” or conversely that “the idea that you have to talk to your professor anytime outside of class, it’s exclusively a bad thing.” These perceptions reverberate through students’ experiences, creating what another described as “a really heavy blow to your pride and your sense of self, when you have to totally just put yourself out early like that.”
Students described how seeking help often feels like admitting weakness: as one student put it, “I’m very determined to get things done by myself, and I don’t want other people to know that I’m struggling.” This reluctance to seek help stems from deeper cultural narratives about competence and worth, particularly at prestigious institutions like ours. One participant noted: “I know, especially at UT, this is a very competitive place to get into. And a lot of people, they’re perfectionists. They hold themselves to a very high standard.” This perfectionistic tendency creates barriers to the very support systems designed to help students succeed.
From this landscape of concern, students proposed several thoughtful approaches to transforming office hours from spaces of anxiety to opportunities for connection. The most concrete suggestion emerged from dance department practice: making office hours visits a course requirement. As one student explained: “Having that, like knowing that I had to go to office hours two times that semester… we can talk about my assignments, or we can talk about my future… it gave me that one-on-one relationship with my professor and my TA.”
Students also suggested that establishing regular email or Canvas contact similarly lowered the stakes and diffuseddefused tension: “I’m not emailing to save my grade. I’m emailing because it’s something that I think would help me later on.” This reframing transforms email and office hours from crisis intervention or remedial stigma to normal and even energizing parts of the learning process. The timing and structure of these interactions also emerged as crucial considerations. One student suggested that required one-on-one meetings midway through the semester created breakthrough moments: “I think the whole class just kind of clicked, and I feel like it catapulted us successfully for the rest of the semester.”
These reflections suggest how challenges in connection might be reimagined not as barriers to overcome but as architectures of possibility – creating spaces where vulnerability becomes strength, where seeking help becomes an act of creative agency rather than an admission of weakness.
Moving Forward: Trust, Compassionate Rigor, and Collective Care
What emerged most clearly was the transformative power of trust between faculty and students. As one student observed about their professor: “You just make it so easy to just talk to you… you’re actually paying attention to our needs.” This kind of authentic engagement creates what another participant called “guard rails” – supportive structures that enable students to take risks and grow while feeling secure.
We all agreed that successful learning environments balance structure with flexibility, accountability with care. As one student shared: “I really liked [our professor’s] policy of – email them and let them know where you’re at… I had some health problems… it made me feel better to know that I could still actively participate in the class as much as I possibly could, but still have the space to take care of my health.” This approach recognizes that true accountability must include care for oneself and others.
The conversation points toward a vision of collaborative education that embraces complexity and individual variation while maintaining rigorous expectations – not through enforcement but by creating environments where students choose to engage deeply with their learning and with their accountability to the class cohort. As one faculty member concluded, “We want not to have to do it by ourselves, because we know that it’s more fun in a group like here.” We hope that this collaborative spirit, bridging traditional hierarchies and examining how collectively built learning structures can foster both individual accountability and community care, will continue to inform our process as our Rigorously Compassionate Cohort moves into our new classes in the spring 2025 semester.
MANY thanks to our students – Kory Farquhar, Ross Ganske, Zach Gray, Madison Lynch, Jake Murphy, Nicolas Siller, Diana Velazquez, Megan Ramos, London Lack, Madeleine Birmigham – who provided most of the insights this reflection is based on!