Building Life-Affirming Classrooms: Centering Empathy, Flexibility, and Accountability

Written by Matthew Bakko on January 26, 2025

As a social worker and scholar, I am committed to creating spaces that care, uplift, and grow. However, I also recognize that systems of care can sometimes advance punitive practices that undermine the very goals of support and growth. My work and ethical commitments involve understanding and eliminating carceral logics—norms, rules, and practices that emphasize punishment, surveillance, and coercion—from systems of service and care. This commitment extends into the classroom and informs my approach to access and inclusion.

I primarily teach graduate students in the School of Social Work. I lead, first and foremost, with empathy. When a student hands me their accommodation paperwork, I ask, “Is there anything else I should know that will make this a supportive learning environment for you?” I practice flexibility. I treat individual requests to provide live recording of lectures, upload PowerPoint slides the day ahead of class, or provide more breaks as opportunities for all students to inhabit a learning environment that supports their basic human needs. Practicing empathy and flexibility informs my approach to accountable trust. When students request an extension, I trust that they understand their own needs and process better than anyone else. At the same time, I emphasize shared responsibility by working with them to set clear expectations. When those expectations are not met, I have open, supportive conversations with students about what they need to succeed in the course.

The idea here is to, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, build something that is life-affirming. Doing so requires a lot of humility and reflexivity, including an understanding that I am a teacher and, even more so, a learner in this endeavor. I am still grappling with many questions. I am continually exploring how to minimize the focus on grades while aligning with the Council on Social Work Education's competency-based standards, or how to foster participation without penalizing students for attendance issues. Ultimately, my goal is to create a classroom where students feel valued, supported, and empowered to grow—not just as learners, but as future practitioners and leaders. This is a continuous journey, and I am grateful to learn alongside my students as we work to build life-affirming spaces together.

Matthew Bakko is an interdisciplinary scholar who researches and teaches how social service providers can effectively implement and influence policy to benefit marginalized groups within dynamic service contexts. His interests are guided by his social work practice experiences as a case manager, program evaluator, and community organizer in nonprofit, governmental, and grassroots community-based settings. He explores how social service providers and organizations shape (and are shaped by) their policy, resource, (inter)organizational, and institutional contexts, which affect street-level policy implementation, service outcomes, and social change. To study this, he primarily conducts mixed-methods research that examines social service providers and related actors working at the intersection of social welfare and criminal legal systems.