Teaching Empathy

Going through the Rethinking Schools archive, I came across an article called Other People's Lives by Linda Christensen. Christensen shares about her practice of writing persona poems with students and guiding them through the process of entering into the world of another person and giving them a voice. Teaching not only writing techniques, but empathy, drives Christensen's approach. You can read the article here.

I found this interesting as I have spent my first year of teaching grappling with how to approach empathy. I have found myself frequently discouraged as I ask students about the feelings of others and have been met often with frustration and "how would I know?!" What makes this intimidating to me is not that it seems like students don't care enough to try to figure out the other person's feelings, but the sense in my gut that they actually feel like they cannot enter that person's experience and are genuinely frustrated that I would ask them to do what they see as the impossible. I am learning to readjust my expectations as to the social emotional baseline my students have to work with, while simultaneously pulling my hair out trying to find a way to integrate essential social skills into my classroom so that my students will be able to function in the world when they graduate in four short years. I hoped to find some keys to use in Christensen's article.

Poetry is a key Christensen has to offer, a writing style that is driven by emotion. Christensen says "I want my students to use poetry to cross the boundaries of race, nationality, class, and gender to find their common humanity with people whose history and literature we study." Students experience emotions every day: making space using poetry for them to understand their own emotions and then find the common humanity in people who are "other" is a powerful way for them to build the capacity for empathy. 

History offers many opportunities for students to form these connections. Most have felt grief, or joy, or confusion, emotions people have felt for all of human history. Christensen soaks students in historical context, having them generate a detailed analysis of texts to understand what it was like to live during different events. She tells students to "Lift off from the writer's words and details to fuel your poem." To do this, students have to notice and authentically connect with the person who will be the voice of their poem. 

To inspire quality work, Christensen provides examples done by previous students. Over the course of time, this has meant that family members are teaching the students, leaving a "legacy" of learning in the classroom that is powerful and accessible to students. Students know the work can be done, that they can empathize and then write something worth reading.

Dissection of the poems is left to the students. In Christensen's words, 'There's no better way to kill poetry than to tell someone else what it means." This was powerful to me as I have often found myself explaining artworks to students and watched them tune out completely. I know better - but I need to do better in my art classroom/studio to put students' learning back into their own hands, to give them experiences instead of lectures, to give them doorways instead of windows.

After dissecting poems, immersing themselves in context, and reviewing expectations, students in Christensen's classroom get to work writing persona poems. They have to take on the persona of the person they are writing about, whether that's an Asian-American immigrant burning possessions for fear of being sent to an internment camp or an urban community member being displaced for the sake of development. The poems included in the article are powerful. They are short, but pack a punch, leaving the reader with a chance to practice empathy the way the author needed to in order to write the poem.

I found this powerful and beautiful, but also complicated. Students need these opportunities to experience empathy and express what it means to understand someone else's experience. However, they cannot truly speak for someone else, and I'd love to ask Christensen if she has had any issues with students appropriating or wildly misconstruing someone else's experience. I think about the underlying social skills needed to engage in this activity and I wonder if her students are just more mature than mine, or if survival mode had truly limited the capacity of my students who are coming from hard situations. My students are hungry and exhausted: can they really be expected to reach the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs before these basic needs are met? If so, how do I do my part to get them there?

Image from this website that explains Maslow's Pyramid: Click Here

Additionally, as I translate Christensen's work into the context of my art room, I think of the deep history of cultural appropriation in art that was normalized until recently. Artists have historically taken the work of other cultures and claimed it as their own without understanding its significance, creating harmful narratives that have aided in the dehumanization and "othering" of other cultures. This is especially true in "primitive" style artworks. While incorporating other cultures into my curriculum, my students and I have  discussions about what it means to appropriate vs. draw inspiration from cultures that are not our own. This is centered in understanding but not stealing someone else's culture and experience. Below is an example of how one of my high achieving students demonstrated this understanding:

Wrestling with how to use this understanding of inspiration, but not appropriating, in art while introducing empathy and connecting with a deep understanding of someone else's experience, my partner reminded me of a documentary showing we attended together about a public art program called Mending Walls. This project by Hamilton Glass saw 16 murals created in one summer in the city of Richmond, Virginia were actually inspired by Robert Frost's poem of the same name. Centered around the discussion of race after the death of George Floyd, these collaborative works required artists from multiple ethnicity to discuss their backgrounds and use their empathetic understandings to create public artworks that authentically shared an experience. Inspiration came from authentic conversation. These powerful works endure today and will be a testimony in the city of Richmond to the power of empathy for years to come. 

This approach stops to truly listen and amplify voices, not just to guess what they may or may not be trying to say. It could be utilized in my art room to help students understand each other and create rich artworks based off of mutual understandings and amplified voices. It would support Christensen's core value of empathy while avoiding many of the struggles that come from trying to tell the story of someone who is not present to speak for themself. While I have many questions about how to make these concepts truly tangible to students who are struggling so much in this area, these conversations where they explore their own experience and learn from their peers may be a powerful way for my classroom to create authentic empathetic experiences in the future.

If you are interested in watching the documentary about Mending Walls, it is truly inspirational and worth the time! You can watch it for free here! And you can check out their website here.