I Stopped Managing Students and Started Facilitating Humans: Recalibrating Teaching in Higher Education

Abstract

This reflective practitioner essay examines joy-centered pedagogy by shifting from classroom management to classroom facilitation in higher education. Drawing on embodied teaching practice, it considers the limitations of management frameworks rooted in K–12 schooling and the need to recalibrate pedagogy when working with emerging and seasoned adult learners. Across academic levels, students struggled with autonomy, accountability, reflection, and instructional follow-through, underscoring that developmental readiness does not automatically align with institutional expectations. Rather than responding with greater structure or tighter control, the essay argues for joy-centered facilitation as a pedagogical stance grounded in care, empathy, agency, and shared responsibility. Within this framework, joy is understood not as ease or positivity, but as an embodied pedagogical resource activated through curiosity, relational trust, and the permission to struggle, fail, and grow. Teaching life skills alongside disciplinary thinking became essential, as did relinquishing performative authority in favor of reciprocal learning. Guided by the principle “if you don’t bend, you’ll break,” this essay presents joy-centered pedagogy as an act of educator recalibration and risk-taking. Framed through a practitioner-scholar lens, it argues that sustainable, humanizing pedagogy begins with the instructor’s willingness to reflect, adapt, and practice differently in hard times.