“Nice White Ladies”: Operationalizing the Empathy Effect on Student-Teacher Interactions With Black Male Students

• In Event: Black Males in the Education Pipeline: Asset-Based Pedagogy for the 21st Century

Abstract

The pervasive underachievement of Black males in U.S. schools is well documented in the education literature. However, the field doesn’t know enough about how a teacher’s response to the intellectual, social, and emotional needs of Black male students in a classroom setting affects their educational attainment. The literature suggests that Black children benefit from having culturally competent teachers who understand their worldview, are effective communicators, and can recognize Black youth’s various learning preferences. Moreover, culturally responsive teaching praxis suggests that teachers adept at “putting on” the cultural lenses/perspectives of diverse students significantly improves their ability to organize authentic, culturally responsive learning experiences for those students. Empathy represents both the process and outcomes associated with “putting on” the perspectives of another in response to that individuals needs.
Labor statistics confirm that White female teachers represent the majority of public school teachers, while students of color make up the majority of today’s growing public school student population in the U.S. It is highly likely that Black male students will be taught by majority middle to upper-class, White female teachers throughout their elementary and secondary academic careers. Researchers have found that White teachers have various misperceptions of Black children, their families, their cultural norms, the way they learn, and their ability to be academically successful. Similarly, a lack of understanding of the cultural perspectives that shape how Black boys navigate the schooling process can significantly impede the teacher’s capacity to accurately judge behavior and appropriately respond to students. As a result, Black males are likely to continue to be disproportionately represented in special education, suspended and expelled from school at higher rates than their peers, and be underrepresented in advanced or honors courses. Hence, this paper explores empathy’s agency for supporting White female teacher’s ability to aptly respond to Black male students and to successfully negotiate various student-teacher interactions mitigating their academic success.
This mixed-methods study uses interviews, focus groups, observations, and quantitative survey research methods to examine how White female teachers conceive of empathy and how empathy is then enacted in their professional practice with Black male students. Black male students discuss the value they place on their teachers’ ability to understand them, respond fairly and appropriately to them. Teachers selected for the study were invited to participate in a case study; agreeing to be observed intensively and interviewed over the course of an entire semester. Finally, a large-scale empathy survey and empathy assessment were developed for dissemination to teachers teaching middle school and high school students in urban school setting.
This study helps teacher preparation programs and teacher educators to: 1) Develop a framework that more clearly defines behavioral and dispositional preferences amongst teacher candidates; and 2) Identify strategies that cultivate pertinent culturally responsive behaviors, competencies, and disposition among teacher candidates. Finally, this work helps all teachers to develop new insights for how empathy can improve cultural responsiveness as well as what the teacher can do to nurture the development of their own empathetic disposition.

Author

• Chezare Warren, University of Pennsylvania