The place of suffering in higher education: pedagogy of suffering revisited
Lee, Jiyoung
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132667
Description
Title
The place of suffering in higher education: pedagogy of suffering revisited
Author(s)
Lee, Jiyoung
Issue Date
2025-11-30
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Burbules, Nicholas C.
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Burbules, Nicholas C.
Committee Member(s)
Bresler, Liora
Taylor, Rebecca
Thurston, Stephanie Mota
Department of Study
Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp
Discipline
Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Pedagogy of Suffering
Philosophical Hermeneutics
Higher Education
Hermeneutic Resilience
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Existential Suffering
Abstract
This dissertation begins from a simple asymmetry that quietly shapes contemporary higher education. Universities have learned to speak with precision about social and historical suffering through well-developed pedagogies of justice, yet they often fall silent, or turn to medicalization, when faced with the personal and existential suffering that inhabits students’ ordinary lives. Such curricular silence equips graduates to analyze structures while leaving them without an inner language for loss, failure, confusion and the slow work of living. Education risks partitioning the person as it assigns anguish to counseling alone and neglects its own capacity for meaning making.
Against this partition, I unfold a Pedagogy of Suffering grounded in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, in conversation with Buddhist wisdom and Nietzsche’s untimely counsel. Suffering is treated not as a defect to be erased but as a human phenomenon that can become thinkable, speakable and shareable through disciplined interpretation. I name this cultivated capacity hermeneutic resilience: the practiced ability to bring mute suffering into language, to undergo Verwinden as an interpretive labor through which understanding is slowly reconfigured.
To render this pedagogy workable rather than merely aspirational, I articulate a framework for discerning when and how to teach, and when to refer. It calibrates the phenomenon along three coordinates of intensity, duration and domain, traces a five-phase movement from muteness toward expression, reflection, the emergence of a new self-relation and eventual integration, and specifies conditions under which difficulty becomes educative rather than depleting. These principles take concrete form in mediated engagements with texts, carefully structured narrative practices and the formation of communities of interpretation, together with ethical safeguards and clear boundaries with therapeutic care. The aim is complement, not substitution. By conceiving engagement with suffering as an interpretive and educational activity, higher education can recover a more balanced curriculum, preparing students not only for work and citizenship but for the quieter art of living meaningfully amid inevitable difficulty.
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