When Kindness Enters the Room: What CSSE 2026 Taught Me About Academic Community

This is a guest post by Dr. Irene Torres Arends, Professor in Liberal Arts at Yorkville University, Fulbright Scholar, and 2026 doctoral graduate from the Werklund School of Education, at the University of Calgary.

I want to begin with a story.

During the 2026 Canadian Society for the Study of Education (CSSE) conference, I was sitting in a room waiting for a presentation to begin. I did not know, at that moment, that I was about to witness one of the most beautiful academic presentations I have ever seen. And I have seen many. But this one stayed with me in a very different way.

The presenter was a PhD candidate. She arrived without a PowerPoint, without slides, without any of the visual supports we often assume are necessary in academic spaces. She had only a marker, a whiteboard, and her own voice. Her supervisor was sitting in the room, quietly accompanying her. The presentation was about students’ silence in the classroom and how silence can be understood through cultural lenses. It was such a delicate and complex topic, and she approached it with extraordinary intelligence.

She began to speak, to write on the board, to draw connections, and to explain ideas with only what she had in front of her. It was not a performance that looked easy. In fact, part of what made it so powerful was that one could see the effort behind it. She was thinking, moving, explaining, and creating meaning in real time. She was standing there with her ideas, her body, her voice, and her courage on display.

But there was something else happening in that room.

Her supervisor was sitting there, watching her. And I confess that I did not know where to look. I wanted to keep looking at the presenter because what she was doing was so intellectually powerful. But I also wanted to look at her supervisor, because her face was full of pride. It was the kind of pride that is difficult to describe unless you have seen it. In Spanish, we say that someone is “pavoneandose” with pride, as if the body itself expands because it cannot contain the emotion. That was what I saw.

At one point, I realized that the most important thing was not one or the other. It was not only the brilliance of the student or only the pride of the supervisor. The beauty was in the relationship between them. What I was witnessing was not simply a conference presentation. I was witnessing an academic relationship in which confidence, trust, and generosity had made something extraordinary possible.

When the presentation ended, the supervisor applauded her and said something like, “See? I told you that you could do it.” And the student responded, in her own way, that she had not wanted to do it because she believed she could not. But her supervisor had kept telling her that she could. And because her supervisor believed she could do it, she stood there and did it.

That moment moved me deeply.

It also helped me understand something important about CSSE. When I first attended CSSE, I must admit, I did not fully understand the conference. There were many sessions, many rooms, and many people moving quickly from one presentation to another. It felt, at moments, like a large and complex academic map that I was still learning how to read. But then, slowly, I began to understand that CSSE is not only a conference. It is also a space where academic relationships are formed and strengthened.

And that is no small thing.

In many academic spaces, there is an invisible rule that you are allowed to belong only after you prove that you already know how to belong. You enter if you speak the right language, cite the right authors, move with the right confidence, and present knowledge in a recognizable way. It can become what Foucault (1970) describes as an order of discourse: a system that determines who can speak, how they can speak, and under what conditions their voice will be recognized. But what I saw at CSSE was different.

I saw supervisors sitting beside their students. I saw professors accompanying emerging scholars with visible care. I saw students at different stages of their academic journeys taking intellectual risks. I saw early career scholars who were not being asked to enter academia as if they had already mastered every code. Instead, they were being welcomed into the community while learning the codes, questioning them, and sometimes transforming them.

That distinction matters.

There is a difference between saying, “If your discourse is acceptable, we will allow you to enter,” and saying, “Come in; we will think with you.” There is a difference between academic gatekeeping and academic accompaniment. There is a difference between evaluating someone from a distance and standing close enough to help them become who they are trying to become.

This difference is where generosity enters the room.

For a long time, I think many of us have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that generosity and academia do not always go together. We are taught to be rigorous, critical, precise, and productive. All of that matters. I believe deeply in intellectual rigour. But somewhere along the way, academia sometimes forgets that rigour without generosity can become cold, and critique without care can become a form of exclusion.

What I saw at CSSE reminded me that generosity is not the opposite of academic seriousness. It is one of its conditions.

Supporting a student is not lowering standards. Encouraging someone does not make the work less rigorous. To believe in a student before they fully believe in themselves is not sentimental; it is pedagogical. It is scholarly. It is part of the ethical labour of education.

I also recognized myself in that scene. I thought about my own experience presenting with my supervisor. I thought about the times when someone else’s confidence in me helped me take a step I was not sure I could take. I thought about how much courage is required from students, especially graduate students, international students, first-generation scholars, and scholars who are still learning how to inhabit academic spaces that were not always designed with them in mind.

That is why generosity matters so much in a community of educators.

When a conference becomes a place of accompaniment, it becomes more than a professional event. It becomes a formative space.

Of course, kindness does not mean that everything is correct or that every idea is complete. Sometimes a paper needs work. Sometimes a question needs to be sharpened. Sometimes a theoretical argument needs to move in another direction. But when there is community, feedback does not feel like expulsion. It feels like guidance. It feels like someone saying, “Perhaps not this way; perhaps try this path instead.”

And that kind guidance can make all the difference.

So, my conclusion is simple but, for me, also profound: kindness and academia are not incompatible. Generosity and intellectual life can live together. In fact, when they do, academic spaces become more honest, more courageous, and more human.

That day, in that conference room, I saw a PhD candidate present with courage. I saw a supervisor watching with pride. I saw an academic community doing what academic communities should do at their best: making room for someone to speak, to try, to risk, to learn, and to belong.

And I left that room thinking, this is also what academic life can be.

References

Foucault, M. (1970). El orden del discurso [The order of discourse]. Tusquets Editores.

Canadian Society for the Study of Education [URL].

The Canadian Society for the Study of Education is the largest organization of professors, students, researchers and practitioners in education in Canada. CSSE is the major national voice for those who create educational knowledge, prepare teachers and educational leaders, and apply research in the schools, classrooms and institutions of Canada. Founded in 1972, the bilingual CSSE is an umbrella organization consisting of several national constituent associations.