Empathy in Education: A Narrative Study into Practicing Teachers’ Experiences

This dissertation interweaves a study of how empathy is understood and talked about with an account of practicing teachers’ experiences. While empathy has long been proposed by educational thinkers as the remedy to social conflicts and divisions, it is also understood in myriad, and at times contradictory, ways. The ambiguity of the term does not seem to lessen empathy’s discursive cachet, however. And since the lack of clear or widely accepted conceptualization is no obstacle to empathy’s flourishing as an educational ideal, I propose that what empathy does (or what educators think it does) is much more important than what empathy is. Thinking of what empathy “does” – of what we are hoping for when we invoke it – frames empathy’s operation as a set of promises. Pedagogies of empathy and their interpretation by teachers thus become sites of examination for issues of systemic injustice in the education system. In fact, I suggest that behind most invocations of empathy are pressing systemic issues, unaddressed. I propose that while an uncomplicated “one-size-fits-all” model of decontextualized, prosocial, and teachable empathy is unlikely to be effective for students and teachers, neither is a model based primarily on teachers’ individual emotional responses to their students.Ph.D.2021-11-13 00:00:0