Greetings Colleagues:
Last Monday’s email about the connections I was discovering between the ideas I had heard recently from colleagues about empathy and “real world” learning resulted in some wonderful further reflections by colleagues.
I share those ideas here. I hope you will spend some time exploring the smart, creative, and inspiring thoughts of your colleagues.
Alicia Lopez (Sociology and Chicano Studies)
I am happy to know how Darder has inspired you and the role that I played in helping that happen.
I also thought about how great it is to come across a quote that was life changing, meaningful, and source of strength at the moment in my teaching career that I needed reassurance that what I was trying to do in the class room was worthwhile. That although discussing race, racism, and privilege was challenging and created anxiety in me (and I’m sure for some students as well), these topics are worth engaging. Love was the answer. Love for what I do, and love for all students. Love over fear.
Eric Carstensen (Accounting)
Alexis Tucker Sade (Anthropology)
I only have time to write a short response, but I wanted to say that when I consider what the most important purpose and lesson students gain from cultural anthropology it is learning the ability to empathize. This includes modeling it as a professor. I tried to include it as a course object in my new course, but I was encouraged to reconsider my use of the term because it could not be measured based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. It made me feel sad that we still have not come to a point where empathy could be an actual learning objective in a course – even though it is the very foundation of my field of study and pedagogical approach. Students have no trouble articulating their new found empathy at the end of my course, now if we would just value it more. Thanks for this message!
Diane Dieckmeyer (VP Instruction)
Glad to be able to be part of the conversation.
Debra Ligorsky (Letters: English)
(I actually combined two emails from Debra here)
I absolutely love the conversation that you have so energetically started. I find myself warmed by the thought that other instructors are thinking about and struggling with similar issues. There is so much that I could say about the Darder, Freire, etc., etc. I think that I would toss Martha Nussbaum into the mix and, more specifically, her Cultivating Humanity. I think that her discussion of the narrative imagination (p109-110) is particularly germane:
Nussbaum has another book that is called Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions (another excellent read!).
If you don’t know the book Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern, it’s another really excellent collection that goes well with the Darder. (one of the editors is Peter McClaren, who used to teach at UCLA and now lives in Orange Country–he knew and worked with Freire and is kind of a rock star in his own right…and quite colorful!!!)
I’m attaching a good Nussbaum interview:
Edward Pohlert (Faculty Director, Retention Services: Tutoring and Academic Support Center )
Your email and content on empathy converged with an activity I just completed at the Student Equity Advisory Committee today. We were asked to share of ourselves so that we may make an explicit connection to equity-mindedness. I chose to highlight my work in 1978 as a Youth Counselor in the Casa Maravilla housing projects in Los Angeles and the responsibility that came with working with youth ages 8 -20 years old. I learned empathy about real life scenarios in their community. I also learned about myself as someone who grew up poor, yet did not have to face the violence they encountered every day. For statistical purposes, 2 out of 10 youth made it out of the projects. I always have thought about the ones who did not. The irony is that this is the job I had after transferring from LACC to CSULA and dropping out of the university after two quarters.
I’ve worked in the CSU and Private college system, yet landed as a faculty member in community college. As a cultural psychologist, I strive to be open and understand people’s different life experiences that can define mentality, skill sets, context, and resilience. To this day when students come through our doors, I serve them with the utmost respect, understanding, and empathy that they might be one of my youth from my Casa Maravilla days. I’m in awe that with over 20 years of formal education, I often consult my “Maravilla Education” so that I might be effective in hearing and sharing stories of resilience that establish a meaningful student-faculty connection.
Laura Carlson (Spanish)
(a comment on the blog)
Paulo Freire! I have all his books. I am going to get Reinventing… ASAP!
When I went to Brazil, every mango tree I saw remind me of him. I was very young when I learned that he taught poor adults how to read under a mango tree. Freire said that “everybody can learn under a mango tree; all we need is it’s shade”.
Delores Leodel (Accounting)
Yes! I love this! What a dream it would be to develop some programs like this.
Louis Moon (Philosophy)
I always find myself starting out your posts by thinking there’s an assignment in there and I need to somehow meet the assignment, when really there are a myriad of conversations in there and I want to somehow join the dialogue, even if my contribution takes it off on a tangent(s).
Tangent the first – many years ago, before MiraCosta, I attended a conference on Pedagogy of the Oppressed with Paolo Freire. It was a wonderful experience, and a wonderful opportunity to think about my teaching in new ways. I noticed that everyone began by thinking that it would work at X level, but not at Y level, where Y level was whatever level s/he was teaching at at that time (elementary, high school, college . . . ), there were even a group of women there whose job involved teaching the victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse (i.e. people with real teaching challenges the likes of which I’m unlikely to encounter). The other thing that impressed me was how Freire recounted his realization that when he used the generic “he” it really didn’t include everyone, and how it led him to re-edit his work and then sit his family down and tell them how they were all oppressing his wife/their mother with their sexist expectations of her cooking and cleaning for them, and it needed to stop.
Tangent the second – lately, I’ve been thinking about automation. So many jobs will soon be automated: everything from order taker to truck driver to stock broker. While there’s a lot of automation related to the job of teaching, the core element of teaching is something that can’t be automated, because it’s about the relationship between a teacher and a student. Even if that relationship is mediated by time and space, as it is with asynchronous, online teaching, it’s still a relationship. I know, in my own case, that despite my degrees that might make me think I have “lifelong learner” status, I nearly always need a teacher for me to be a learner. Otherwise, I suppose we would all have been rendered irrelevant by the invention of the printing press.
Which leads me to today. Today I was sitting in on Jeff Murico’s World Religions class, learning about Judaism, and how the Talmud is written in dialogue form, with the rabbis (teachers) teaching using conversation, and it reminded me of the early teachers in other religious and philosophical traditions, stemming from the Vedas through the ancient Greek philosophers through the Talmud, and later through Berkeley’s dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, and into today’s dialogues in Jeff’s class when he has students bring in preliminary questions they had about Judaism. If you think about it — and I do — even Twitter is a conversation, although not one in which we tend to learn because there are no teachers on Twitter, just a cacophony of voices with no teacher: no authority and no expertise. It made me think about how I balance dialogue with my role as teacher/expert in my own classes.
Tony Burman (Letters: English)
Freire’s my academic donut; mention him and I’ll be there. His work on critical literacy serves as the foundation for many of the courses I teach. I love how he asks us to move the language conversation from grammatical to political. I find students, too, appreciate this orientation as it returns agency to many students who seem to arrive in our classrooms beat down by more formulaic, write-by-numbers approaches to literacy education. (I’m not dissing the power that these approaches can have in the right contexts, but…) In sum, I find it fitting you mention him in a conversation about empathy.
But I also wonder if Freirean approaches and empathy are a luxury for us, and by ‘us’ I am referring to those instructors who are teaching skill-based courses like composition. For example, in my courses, I can nip and tuck as we go. If we’re moving too slowly, or we end up in a new pasture, or if we have to make a u-turn halfway through the semester, then we do it. (I’m trying to mix as many metaphors as possible here;) The real focus of the course is on how a dialectical approach to knowledge production aids the student’s intellectual growth. Translation: I want students’ writing and thinking to improve regardless of the content. In this case, empathy seems part and parcel of the pedagogy. Yet, I recognize that student-centered, literacy-based pedagogies afford many opportunities that likely do not exist in many other types of classrooms precisely because content ain’t in the driver’s seat.
But what happens when content is driving? Hand me a content heavy course — art history, bio, etc. — and I think the challenges abound. I’d love to hear from folks for whom content can/may act as a potential obstacle to an empathy-based approach to the classroom, for whom the pressures of a sequence — or the pressures of an outside assessment — may mean that the empathetic approach must occasionally take a backseat. Perhaps empathy manifests in different ways in these courses?
From an even broader perspective, I’d be quite interested in a more general multidisciplinary conversation about the values that undergird our fields, departments, courses, and individual pedagogies. We could speak of empathy, sure, and we could speak of many other values– creativity, compassion, curiosity, achievement, imagination, judiciousness, practicality, rationality… I’m often awestruck — frequently inspired and occasionally chagrined — by the ways people talk about their disciplines. I believe such a conversation could prove quite beneficial, as it would likely correct some of the myopia I’m sure informs many of our views of the campus (See my bumbling characterizations of content-heavy courses as Exhibit A.) The conversation could potentially serve as catalysts for all sorts of interesting pollinations — learning communities, project-based partnerships, among others.
That’d be a fun chat.
And, finally, on a more serious note..
Mike Fino (Dean, Math and Sciences)
Thanks to all who contributed to this conversation!
Prepostero