I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find somewhere online to download the Foreword and Introduction to share because they are so powerful and thoughtful. I have highlighted nearly every line.
Let me list some of my favorite parts... from the Foreword:
Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno begins his 1966 essay "Education After Auschwitz" with the now famous lines, "the premiere demand of all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it ... never again Auschwitz." Adorno taps into two truths that critical educators have held onto for most of the past century: 1) that the education children receive can increase hatred and barbarism in the world, and 2) that a critical and reflexive educational experience can help increase the authentic dialogue, intercultural understanding, and civic action that may help significantly reduce acts of hatred and intolerance in our increasingly heterogeneous and interconnected society.
Unfortunately, like Adorno, we must continually justify a critical approach to teaching and learning. The global industrial rhetoric around primary, secondary, and tertiary education prioritizes workplace readiness, quantifiable literacy, and numeracy skills above all else. It is rare to find any measure of school system success that includes kindness, empathy, or proclivity to act toward justice in the world. As Marian Wright Edelman, president and founder of the Children's Defense Fund would say, "Shame on us!" Although academic literacy rates are rising domestically and internationally, and more young people than ever are accessing secondary and tertiary education, we see daily - in acts of violence, prejudice, intolerance, and oppression - the need to revisit Adorno's question: What good is increased access to education if it does not serve to make the world a more peaceful and connected community?
... how can education increase civic dialogue while also fostering academic and critical literacies for our most vulnerable populations?
How can English teachers, in their daily interactions with students, address disciplinary content while also fostering empathy and civic engagement? How can we conceptualize literacy to encompass active citizenship and a regard for others? How can English teachers utilize the imaginative texts of our discipline like novels, plays, poems, memoirs, films, musical lyrics, and digital narratives to foster what Maxine Greene calls a social imagination in the service of what Mirra terms a critical civic empathy?
And from the Introduction:
Several years ago, the Pew Research Center (2014) posed these questions in a survey to a nationally representative sample of 10,000 U.S. adults:
*How do you think you would react if a member of your immediate family told you they were going to marry someone of a different race? How about a gun owner? Or someone who does not believe in God?
*Imagine you are moving to another community. Would living in a place where most people share your political views be important to you?
*Think about elected officials in Washington who share your positions on the most important issues facing the nation. Should they work with elected officials they disagree with, even if it results in some policies you don't like?
The primary purpose of the survey was to explore political polarization; however, considering the extent to which these questions grapple with our interactions with people who hold different perspectives and experiences from our own, it also can be seen as a sort of referendum on empathy. These questions, in effect, were asking: Can you work with, live with - even love - people unlike yourself?
The responses suggested that empathy was in dangerously short supply, and follow-up data from the Pew Research Center (2017) indicate that the trends are continuing to worsen. Many citizens are retreating into ideological silos in which their political views determine not only how they vote, but also whom they befriend, where they live, and how they define political progress. Media experts warn that too many of us are learning about and responding to these challenges from news outlets and social networks that reflect our existing opinions and biases back to us, creating what they call an "echo chamber" effect. Facebook algorithms seek to determine our political persuasions and direct us to like-minded content, while cable news networks predictably interpret (and sometimes bend or obfuscate) facts to appeal to liberal or conservative voters. The overall message that emerged from the study: We hold fiercely to our views, we want to be surrounded by others who share them, and we don't want to compromise with those who don't.
In a 2006 speech at Northwestern University, then-senator Barack Obama declared:
"There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit - the ability to put ourselves in someone's shoes; to see the world through those that are different from us - the child who's hungry, the laid off steel worker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room."
Empathy. The concept is now popping up with regularity in news articles and opinion pieces - it seems as if everyone is thinking about who should be empathizing with whom and how all of us can be empathizing more, particularly in the wake of the polarizing 2016 U.S. presidential election.
I suggest in this book that the development of empathy in students (and teachers) should be considered a primary goal of education because it offers an organizing principle for our field grounded in hope, love, and a commitment to a more equitable society. Embracing a purpose to shape young adults who can step outside their personal experience to compassionately imagine the lives of others and act civically based on those experiences can help our profession prioritize and streamline our practice so that, instead of feeling pulled in a million directions, we stand committed to one.
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." - James Baldwin
Philosopher Maxine Greene argues that reading allows young people to develop a "social imagination" that they can use to imagine various selves and different visions of a just society. Once students can imagine a range of possible worlds, they are better prepared to begin building the ones they want to see.
Without more attention to what it means to participate in the structures of power of our democratic system. let alone to analyze the flaws in these structures, civic education falls far short of preparing students to tackle the political challenges of our time.
We are individuals, but our individuality is couched within overlapping social constructs, including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, that have historical, economic, and political ramifications. If we as individuals seek to empathize with others as individuals, we are likely to, first, interpret experiences in ways that revert to what is familiar to us and, second, miss out on the significance of those social constructs for how we interact in public life.
In fact, we must consider that the very ideas of empathy and perspective taking are politicized and inequitable. Those with more power across any number of social constructs, from race and gender to religious and sexual orientation, often fail to consider their perspectives as just that - perspectives - because they are so accustomed to seeing them represented as the norm in society. By contrast, those with less power constantly are forced to navigate the views of others in order to survive, while seeing theirs minimized, bothered, or outright ignored. Calling for students to learn empathy without taking these power dynamics into account can easily become an exercise in papering over generations of implicitly and explicitly enforced hegemony.
Nicole Mirra proposes a new concept to guide the work of educators - critical civic empathy.
Critical civic empathy is about more than simply understanding or tolerating individuals with whom we disagree on a personal level; it is about imaginatively embodying the lives of our fellow citizens while keeping in mind the social forces that differentiate our experiences as we make decisions about our shared public future. Critical civic empathy has three defining principles:
1. It begins from an analysis of the social position, power, and privilege of all parties involved.
2. It focuses on the ways that personal experiences matter in the context of public life.
3. It fosters democratic dialogue and civic action committed to equity and justice.
And finally, Figure 1.1 Typology of Empathy: Imaginative Refusal, False Empathy, Individual Empathy, and Critical Civic Empathy
First, we must acknowledge that there are many examples of speech and action that embody the exact opposite of empathy - examples of individuals striving to foster fear of others and sow seeds of division and political cynicism. I label these as expressions of imaginative refusal because they show no concern for mutual humanization and seek to break down rather than build up faith in collaborative democratic action to address the challenges we face as a nation. They represent individuals who lack the imagination needed to relate to others or the will to develop it.
But there are also those who, while they have no true interest in mutual humanization, utilize the rhetoric of empathy for craven political gain. Within this category, which I call false empathy, I place politicians who talk about virtues of "American values" or the "American people," but in a coded way that refers to only some values or some Americans with whom they agree.
The third category in the typology - individual empathy - refers to the aforementioned most popular understanding of empathy as the ability to walk a mile in someone's shoes while avoiding consideration of what it means to support them as a fellow citizen. Again, if we claim to empathize with someone who differs from us in any of the social constructs that stratify public life but then do not vote in favor of policies that would help redress past injustices or prevent future injustices, our compassion remains at the individual level and can serve to maintain an inequitable status quo.The typology of empathy is a lot to unpack. But individual empathy is where many of us get stuck. It is where many school programs tend to focus.
Nicole Mirra goes on to say:
To tell young people that they will have equal opportunities to succeed if they play by the rules and treat others as they would like to be treated harms all young people. For those on the privileged side of inequities, this rhetoric can blind them to the structural forces working in their favor and leave them thinking that individual merit alone causes their successes; for those on the marginalized side, it can leave them with defect orientations about themselves or their communities and cause civic alienation.
This section reminded me of the first two lines of the book, The Great Gatsby:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
I believe that parents and teachers want young people to be more than just prepared for college and career. I think we want future generations to tackle challenges with thoughtfulness, grace, and compassion. Critical civic empathy combined with literary texts offers a look into this work. Let's help students learn how to use their literacy skills to advocate for themselves and their communities.
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