Lack of empathy may be the world's biggest problem right now. You might not think this if you read a lot of Twitter arguments. Someone always says, "How would you feel if . . ." and while that sounds empathetic, the motivation is to win the argument. That's not empathy. It the same old selfishness disguised as compassion. A wolf in sheep's clothing is not a sheep, and the person who pretends compassion is not compassionate.
We are so polarized that the very idea of what someone else thinks or feels is offensive to us, so we carefully cultivate our world (friending and unfriend, following and unfollowing) to hear as little as possible from those with whom we disagree. Whether the issue is immigration, racial injustice, the waitress serving our table more slowly than we would like, or a rival athletic team, we don't want to imagine "the other side" as human beings with their own thoughts and feelings.
Anyone who has been in education longer than a day knows that we aren't just responsible for teaching content. We also teach life skills, study skills, thinking abilities, and engage in character development. If we are going to fulfill our mission with students, we must find ways to teach empathy. Here are a few ways that I've seen in my own school. Please share what you do in yours.
Project Construction:
When GRACE teachers construct projects, we often think of ways to broaden student thinking to take others into account. One of our English teachers partnered her class with a class from another school. They engaged in a Twitter chat about "the American dream." Our students heard stories and viewpoints they otherwise would not have. Fifth-grade students learning about the Holocaust were assigned roles as Jews and wore stars of David, had restrictions on which doors and water fountains they were allowed to use in order to experience what it feels like to be isolated and limited for no reason. Physics students are assigned a region of the world to research and asked to propose the solution to a problem that engineering could help solve. They are required to use the available resources of the area, not swoop in with a western solution. Our AP Statistic students collect and analyze data for local non-profits. These are only a few examples. If you walk through the halls of either campus, you will see projects that encourage empathy development.
Modeling Empathy in Our Interactions
For all the planned activities teachers and students engage in, the vast majority of our day involves unplanned conversation. When a student asks a question, it means they are open to a change in thinking. The way we answer them matters. Do we treat the question like an interruption to our plan, or do we remember what it was like to not understand? When a student complains about another teacher, do we let it go or do we ask them to think about why that teacher might have done that? What might that teacher have been thinking? When a student says something mean or insensitive, do we simply punish or does our discipline involve asking that student to put themselves in the other students' position? All of these unplanned interactions reveal how we think, which students notice.
Community Service
My school requires students to complete a certain number of community service hours for graduation, but we want them to view service more deeply than that. The hope is that the requirement will expose them to a variety of service organizations and opportunities ranging from local thrift stores to Habitat for Humanity to food service organizations. In a time of slacktivism, when many believe they have made a difference by using a hashtag or putting a banner on their Instagram profile, we want our students to really engage in service by investing their time. Many of our students find that one of those opportunities ignites a passion for service and become active because of the intrinsic motivation to help others.
Writing Opportunities
I've often said that English teachers know their students better than anyone else because they read so much of their writing. I know I said things in essays that I didn't talk about in other places. It's just hard to write without putting something of yourself into it. But English teachers don't need to be the only people who provide students with these opportunities. It will look different in the different areas of discipline, but you can craft questions and writing prompts that both lead to mastery of content, use of Bloom's evaluation level thinking skill (yes, I know it's not on the new Bloom's but it still matters), and empathy. History teachers can ask their students to write as a suffragette or a soldier in the Civil War. Science teachers can ask their students to evaluate the application of scientific discoveries (nuclear power v. nuclear weapons) from the perspective of Neils Bohr and/or a citizen of Japan. Foreign language teachers probably have more opportunities than anyone to introduce their students to the thinking of people different from themselves. If you don't want it to be in the form of writing, that's fine. They can accomplish the same in a skit, video, song, debate, or any other creative way you can think of.
The Arts
Every study about arts education shows that whether it is theater, dance, visual art, or music, students who participate in the arts have an increased level of empathy. While it is risky to assume reasons from statistical data, they do prompt us to ask why the numbers are what they are. I'm not an arts educator (just an enthusiastic supporter), but as I've read about these studies, it seems most arts educators agree that the increase in empathy results from trying to portray the creative work of others (band music students are usually performing the work of another) and also trying to get others to understand their own message (visual arts and dance are often putting out original work). Some curriculum includes both. You can see how the development of empathy would happen even if it weren't a specific goal of the curriculum. When it is a specific goal, the result is practically magical, as I got to see yesterday.
Yesterday, I attended our school's fall play. While I have enjoyed and been entertained by every play we have done, I've never been more impressed by my students as much as I was with this one. The play is called Women and War. My students stepped into the shoes of Vietnam nurses, gold star mothers, war protestors, wives waiting for their husbands to return from Korea, WWII soldiers writing to their girl at home, and those who served in other capacities (like phone operators and USO girls). They portrayed worry, sadness, anger, joy, and PTSD. Their preparation involved more than memorizing lines and learning stage blocking. They read dozens of articles, visiting the WWI immersive exhibit at our local museum, interviewed an air force reservist, and attempted to truly interpret the intent of the playwright. The result was a theatre experience unlike any I've seen in a high school. In the audience, you could have heard a pin drop. There was none of the shifting around, moving to restrooms, and talking between scenes that have become relatively normal at plays (even though they shouldn't). The only sounds were those of sniffles from people who had been moved to tears. When the lights went it out, there was a beat before the applause began, and even then, it was quieter applause than normal. The audience needed that moment as they moved from experiencing the characters and their stories to remembering that they were an audience. There was empathy in the audience, but it was because there was empathy on that stage. For the two dozen cast and crew of this play, Veteran's Day will not be the same. Neither will their studies of history class or trips to DC. Once empathy has been achieved, it marks their hearts.
Like anything else, there is no "one size fits all" method. Writing will not successfully build empathy in all students; neither will community service. Both methods will reach some. Projects are not going to open all of their eyes, but participation in the arts might. If each method reaches some, the cumulative effect will be powerful. Do as many as you can wherever it fits in the context of your school.
