Arguing for Empathy: Teaching Argumentation to Engage Critical Thinking and Empathetic Understanding

• In Event: Disrupting the Discipline: Subversive Teaching in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom

Abstract

Objectives
This paper examines how a secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher subverted a “typical” lesson on argumentation in order to facilitate students’ critical thinking and empathetic understanding. Following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting, the teacher worked with a teacher educator to develop a lesson using Emma Gonzalez’s “We Call BS” speech (CNN, 2018) as an example of argumentative rhetoric; following their critical analysis of the speech’s rhetorical elements, students engaged their empathetic understanding by drafting a letter to the victims and their families, a letter to a state representative or a response to the teacher. Students’ engagement with challenging texts – like a speech on gun violence written and delivered by a fellow adolescent – has the potential to develop their abilities as critical thinkers and support their individual agency (Shoffner, Alsup, Garcia, Haddix, Moore, Morrell, Schaafsma & Zuidema, 2017). Such challenging texts should actively engage students with the world while requiring them to question and respond to that world (Pescatore, 2007).

Conceptual framework
Intersections of adolescent literacy (NCTE, 2006) and care (Noddings, 2005) provide the conceptual framework for this paper. Understanding adolescent literacy as the processes that students use to discover, analyze, understand and create texts (NCTE, 2006), critical literacy requires students to question the social, political and economic issues shaping the texts they study (Beck, 2005) Understanding care as the belief that all people are worthy of attention, understanding, empathy and support (Noddings, 2005), empathic understanding requires students “to connect with others who are different, see their common humanity, and begin to care about the situation” (Goodman, 2000, p. 1067).

Data and methods
The context of the lesson was an 11th grade ELA class in a public charter school in San Francisco, CA; as of the 2017-2018 school year, the school enrolled 428 students, with 275 students identified as Latinx, 228 identified as male and 59 identified as English learners (Ed Data, 2018). Three forms of data inform this paper: curriculum materials developed for the lesson, student materials created during the lesson and personal communication between the teacher and the teacher educator. Qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2005) was used to code the collected data in order to examine students’ potential engagement with critical literacy and empathetic understanding.

Conclusions and scholarly significance
Teachers must respect students as thinkers and actors in order to create curriculum that “reaches outside the classroom and gives students opportunities to exercise their moral and political sensibilities” (Chiang, 2019, 17th para). Likewise, teachers must accept responsibility for developing students’ abilities to “affirm and respond to the world’s diversity in ways that support and promote empathy, acceptance and understanding” (Shoffner, 2018, para. 8). By developing lessons that both work within and beyond the traditional curriculum, teachers can challenge the status quo while supporting students’ development of critical literacy and empathetic understanding.

Authors

• Melanie Shoffner, James Madison University

• Crystal Sogar, Summit Preparatory High School