The place of suffering in higher education: pedagogy of suffering revisited

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educ Policy, Orgzn & Leadrshp

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Lee, Jiyoung

Contributors dc:contributor

• Burbules, Nicholas C.
• Bresler, Liora
• Taylor, Rebecca
• Thurston, Stephanie Mota

• Pedagogy of Suffering
• Philosophical Hermeneutics
• Higher Education
• Hermeneutic Resilience
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Existential Suffering

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Jiyoung Lee

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132667

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132667