Empathy, Fiction, and an Educational Ecosystem: A Narrative Case Study of an English Language Arts Classroom

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: Social and Emotional Learning as Pedagogies to Support Care, Belonging, Agency, and Empathy (Table 17)

Abstract

This study explores how empathy exists, as an experience, in an 11th grade ELA classroom using Transactional Reader Response Theory (Rosenblatt, 1988). Narrative inquiry methodology was used to collect and assemble instances of engaged empathy while reading. Guided by Doll’s (1993) premise of the classroom as an ecological, open system with multiple contributing forces, data was collected through observation, interviews, artifacts, textbooks, and the researcher’s reflections to re-present the classroom's empathic ecosystem.
Analysis of data finds the presence of empathy in five categories: mentalizing, identification, situational, moral, and embodied/corporeal. Pedagogical strategies for fostering empathy through these categories are identified. Implications of the study indicate that while engagement with empathy enriched reading experience, empathizing itself is unpredictable and sometimes volatile.

Author

• Danielle Klein, Rockford University
  Presenting Author