Re-authoring Empathy: Constructing Narratives of Empathic Understanding and Engagement in Higher Education

In this research study I write stories of empathic experience with 2 research participants. We write as a method of data analysis where we reconstruct our own lived experiences of empathy in order to become more conscious and self-aware in our understanding of how we each learned empathy. These experiences, brought forward into the present, create hope and possibility for new self-knowledge. This new self-knowledge supports the embodiment of empathy in a teaching practice. The self and other context of empathy is examined as a relational experience in this narrative inquiry, where feelings and understandings are brought to light through the narrative process of recovery and reconstruction of meaning in storied form. This research process supports my belief that knowledge is constructed, and that this holistic practice of curriculum as lived experience supports pathways for meaning-making and self-understanding.Ph.D