Deepening Empathy and Addressing Diversity: Lectio Divina as a Holistic Tool for ESL Education

• In Event: Rituals of Resistance: Lectio Divina as a Holistic Tool for Transformation

Abstract

The UNESCO holistic education category of “Learning to Live Together” recognizes that dialogue promotes the ability to empathize and address diversity. Furthermore, it suggests that dialogue can be a preventative to war and conflict (1996). This story-telling-to-poem and social media integration study promotes dialogue and may provide healing. It moves individuals toward greater empathy and understanding. Because the process requires active listening instead of dismissing without hearing the story the individual on the “other” side may have to tell. This mixed-method study included pre- and –post surveys measuring students’ understandings of empathy and diversity before and after the story-telling-to-poem intervention. Qualitative data were also collected via randomized focus groups at the end. Our preliminary findings suggest that ESL students’ levels of empathy and awareness of diversity increased as a result of our story-telling to poem intervention.
Over the course of three years (2015-2017) we have been utilizing story-telling-to-poem interventions with in-service and pre-service teachers. The twelve participants in this new leg of our study were English as a Second Language (ESLs) at the undergraduate level. The intervention involved two stages. Within the space of the first stage, students wrote a draft of a poem about the other person’s story or a poem that combined the two stories. Using Instagram, each participant was required to send 3 Instagram photographs that pertained to the story told. At the beginning of the second stage, students were introduced to Lectio Divina and invited to share the draft poems they had written through Hamma’s 4-step Lectio Divina process. The final draft of the poems were created during the second stage. The Instagram photographs provided opportunities for all poets to add details.
One aspect that differentiates this study from others is the integration of Instagram as an innovation in ESL (Jaworski, 2010). The combination of multi-modal literacy encourages language and creativity. Rather than initially reading a text, students must develop relational intelligence when they pay attention or “read” the story that their classmate tells them. Through a series of creative steps, using people’s lived realities as a text, the students move from paying attention to pondering the stories they have told each other in order to respond by creating a written text. They surrender pre-conceived notions, opening themselves to empathy with another, and consequently “cooperative social behavior” (Mahmoudi et al 2012). Our projects move from the oral and aural or visual to the written or photographed response empowering communication among the ESL students via creativity (Higgins, 2014).
Holistic education maintains that relational development is one of the key factors in developing the whole person (UNESCO, 1996). We agree that relational development depends on recognizing others’ humanity and respecting their cultural background. As Maxine Greene (1995) suggests, empathy has to do with recognizing the preciousness of all human beings. Like Greene’s work, our study shares the goals of holistic and embodied pedagogy through Lectio Divina, enabling students and teachers to embrace diversity, deepen empathy, and recognize the value of self and others.

Authors

• Maureen Patricia Hall, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth

• Catherine E Hoyser, University of Saint Joseph

• Nicholas Santavicca, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth