The concept of empathy matters more than ever—it's an issue that's garnered increasing attention over the past decade. Empathy should hopefully call to mind much-needed and celebrated educator qualities like nurturing and support as opposed to still being mistaken for a fancier version of coddling and enabling. There is definitely much more to learn about empathy and its vital importance for the roles played by schools, teachers, families and communities.
Here's a great place to start: if you're an educator or leader and haven't checked out A.J. Juliani's podcast series Leading with Empathy (Scratch Your Itch), you're missing out—yet another great listen suggested to me by my "Leading Digital Learning and Innovation" professor, Stephany Anderson!
In his most recent episode, which serves as a bridge between interviews, Juliani hints at future work that will explore what "empathetic" actually looks like as an everyday phenomenon and practice, especially through the lens of storytelling, which, as this episode proposes, might be an even more powerful educational resource than technology!
Storytelling, Juliani says, "builds empathy...Stories provide a window and a mirror into our lives and the lives of others. And isn't that what empathy's all about, right? Putting yourself in another person's position and predicament."
Technology has pushed and blurred the boundaries of what's possible. But for the more slowly evolved human brain, stories lend narrative coherence to content. Storytelling is therefore a fundamental mode of sense-making, a principle vehicle for what we commonly call meaning; it is an ancient practice that allows us to make sense of both ours and others' experiences, thereby fostering empathy.
To better understand the personal journey of the author, I've decided to start from the beginning of his podcast series, where there are some very interesting early interviews with Trevor Ragan, Angela Duckworth, and James Clear, among others.
I've begun to familiarize myself with Ragan and Duckworth, while Clear is a must read. I've had the opportunity to write and post here a little bit about Ragan's podcast. So I'd like to linger for a moment on Duckworth's current work in the context of her well-known book and eponymous TED Talk, Grit.
This seminal study has laid the foundation for some promising research, as discussed in Juliani's podcast interview with the guru of grit herself. They build on this portrait of resilience to also talk about equity, empathy, and curiosity. Retracing the steps of her inquiry, Duckworth explains that it was the achievement gap—"what a kid could do and what they were currently doing"—that kept her up at night.
At the outset of her career, Duckworth challenged herself to close this gap while teaching middle school; she discovered that her students' behavior was best explained by things like motivation, effort, response to frustration, confidence, interests, and curiosity. Conversely, "raw talent" did not appear to have any concrete predictive power when it came to performance and achievement.
These observations led Duckworth to embark upon a fruitful career in applied research psychology, where years later, she is now co-creator and director of the Character Lab, which specializes in "actionable" and science-based advice for parents and teachers. The motivation behind this research? Duckworth alludes to a "curiosity crisis" for students, arising from endless choices and distractions. This in turn results in negative behaviors that may fluctuate between two extremes: 1.), a kind of paralysis or inertia; and 2.), an aimless or never-ending search for self-purpose and passion; either of which may arrest one's full potential and development.
We've all seen stories of school refusal, teenage apathy, midlife crisis. But Duckworth aims for the root psychological causes, pursuing evidence that can be used in order to state, in plain and factual language, what we can do for kids NOW so that they, too, find themselves on a promising path toward becoming really good at what they do well into adulthood.
As in the animal kingdom, psychologists have found that we humans also tend to vacillate in turns, and not to engage simultaneously, between phases of exploration and exploitation, focusing on either foraging for new finds (opportunities, hobbies, passions) or safeguarding and building up our existing resources (habits, knowledge, skills). In the beginning, we want to nurture exploration while helping to hone the skills that ultimately prepare students to exploit whatever it is that they're good at and that gives them an ethos and a sense of purpose or value throughout their lives.
Duckworth and Juliani are naturally drawn, in the course of this interview, to the work of educators and scholars focused especially on empathy, which is a "place to start." It would actually appear to be THE first step. It takes time to "rekindle curiosity," as Duckworth notes, likening the process to building a slow-burning fire from scratch. Can we insert Castaway or favorite Survivor episode here?
The problem with curiosity, as Duckworth notes, is that there is no "yardstick" for it in the education and working worlds. For example, her own curiosity has to do with her truth, her lived experiences, but she would be the first to say that despite whatever adversities or opportunities she has had along the way, she has also developed character. When I think about character—which Duckworth defines as very similar to Martin Luther King's and Aristotle's conceptions of it, namely, social and emotional competencies and the basis of a life well-lived—I envision it as an outgrowth of grit and resilience, encompassing these and the other qualities, like mindset, empathy and curiosity.
A useful exercise in empathy that Duckworth suggests is the two-column list: "worries" on the left side and "resources" on the right (more popular terms on the Web are respectively "pains" and "gains"). This also represents a significant exercise in equity. It is obvious that these lists will vary widely, but it's the details, the powerful stories, which are able to lead to greater understanding. Here, we also have a clear, winning strategy for building a more inclusive classroom. Anyone not genuinely moved by any level of disparity, even if represented in a single student, should not be working in education.
At this point in the discussion we can all take a natural pause, a much-needed timeout, to reflect on what it is that we, as educators, are doing and can do for students and their families with such disparate lists of worries and resources, pains and gains. How can we nurture that exploration phase for those students who don't have quite so many things at their disposal that would allow them greater opportunity to find their purpose and passion in life?
I don't pretend to have an easy answer. In my very first blog post, I talked about how we can be more understanding of our students' needs in this unprecedented time. I've also taught in many diverse settings in NJ public schools, one of them being Union City, New Jersey, one of my absolute favorite places to teach. Where I am teaching now, in a close-knit and high-performing suburban community, the needs and resources are very different. The kids are the kids you have in terms of school attitudes and outlooks; it most often has to do with the community, school, and family cultures that shape the local working environment. As they say, it takes a village. My job is relatively easy, since I have students who adapt fairly well to the demands of remote learning.
However, when I look back on the road thus traveled, I wonder how many of my former Union City students, for example, would have taken to ERT virtually from their homes. I know many would be fine; others I had the chance to know, not as much. There is so much inequality in New Jersey schools, that I cannot help but imagine the damaging effects of COVID-19 on the lives of many students and their families.
One could just as easily dismiss "empathy" as another edutalk buzzword, a now overused idea in the jargon of education. It is by no means easy to provide all students with the things they need to explore their passions married to their purpose, their truth, so that they can find the skills they need to hone for life.
But if empathy is nothing else than the relentless effort, doing whatever it takes—including the psychology, the pedagogy, the refinement, the art and the practice—to get all students there, what left is there in education? In the end, businesses may debate the economic merits of empathy, but there is not yet an abundance of it in the education world. Let's start by trying to connect with each one of our students during this crisis. Unlike higher-ed students, P-12 students cannot demand some of their tuition money back; their parents may or may not get a check from the IRS, but they're not getting their education tax dollars back. They depend on us, and we all have to make the effort to dig deep inside, grow, learn and always do better, in order to do what's right in service of our kids.
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