Teaching Empathy

Why would empathy be a valuable component of news and media literacy instruction? After all, gaining empathy, while nice, would not appear to directly help students become more in formed or savvy news consumers.

But it could accomplish something larger. It might provide a deeper understanding and appreciation of the variety of worldviews and how those differences impact how dissimilar groups approach, trust, and integrate different sources of knowledge.

What are these other ways of knowing? Native communities, for one, rely on the knowledge of elders and lived experience. People tend to come to decisions based on different inputs, says Professor Young, such as those that come to truth more by intuition and trusting their instinctual sense of things. “People who are motivated by efficiency over accuracy may tap into intuition-based reasoning more than evidence-based reasoning. This is great under conditions of threat,” but these same predispositions can be “exploited by our media economics to fuel emotional, biased, identity-driven responses.”

Technology and social media scholar danah boyd said a great deal about the importance of empathy in her provocative March 2018 SCSW Edu keynote, “What Hath We Wrought?” ( points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2). In an email interview she further explained her perspective:

[Empathy] helps us realize that there are different — legitimate — ways of seeing the world. … Empathy requires developing a strong sense of how others think and where the differences in perspective lie. From an educational point of view, this means building the capacity to truly hear and embrace someone else’s perspective and teaching people to understand another’s view while also holding their view firm. It’s hard work, an extension of empathy into a practice that is common among ethnographers. It’s also a skill that is honed in many debate clubs. The goal is to understand the multiple ways of making sense of the world and use that to interpret media.

She went on to add:

The key to deep trust is through experience relying on other people. Want to build empathy across distance? Create the conditions where people have to bond.

Boyd suggested a couple of empathy-building exercises:

• Send students out to engage with people who are different than they are. Better yet, send them out in pairs of people who start out from different perspective to engage with a third perspective that’s alien to both of them; they’ll learn to appreciate the common ground they have (i.e., both being your students).
• Teach reflexivity, awareness, and generosity as tools. boyd said one of her favorite grad school classes required that all Ph.D. students read five ethnographies … and say not a single bad thing about any of them in class, focusing only on how the work contributed to the field. What were the authors trying to achieve? How was the world configured such that this approach made sense at the time? And so on. Rather than asking people to start from a cynical place, have them start with a generous place. If you center on empathy, not critique, you can build a basis for the harder conversations.

Pema Chödrön also teaches Just Like Me, an empathy-building exercise. The goals were explained to me by Trinkar Ötso, a layperson (“Upshaka”) leader who also resides at Gampo Abbey. The exercise is designed to get one to slow down and take just a few seconds to imagine how no one wants to suffer: All persons want to be free of pain, have enough to eat, and have a safe place to live. This other person, “just like me,” does not want to feel afraid either. (Pema described the exercise in a video with Oprah Winfrey; youtube.com/watch?v=vN6hTFfqgd0.)

Trinkar says that the practice provides a way to slowly en large our capacity to engage with people we disagree with and in situations that we find hurtful. It does not bypass necessary action when something needs intervention or a thoughtful response, she adds, but it can give just a bit of space around the strong emotions and habitual tendencies to, maybe, find some new ways to react.

Empathy, then, could open students’ minds and hearts in a direction that might create a more accepting, charitable, or, at least, a more human-centered view of other people who have a much different culture or set of experiences that are not grounded in a Western scientific worldview. And that perspective could broaden one’s views to be in a better position to understand these other knowledge sources and how to better consider their relevance and value, when in the realm of scholarship, as news sources, or other contexts. And perhaps, for those cases where people have been completely fooled into believing and even acting on malevolent untruths, one might also try to develop compassion, which is another critical capacity raised by Trinkar.

One final question

What would it take to teach sustainable media literacy— instruction that creates a deep, intuitive, and lifelong capacity to understand data, information, and knowledge almost, as say, a trained historian, journalist, librarian, or other scholar can? Is it possible? What would that teaching look like? Of course, ideally, these would be skills and capabilities integrated as a regular part of a K–12 curriculum and beyond, but this is not, at least yet, at all common in state curriculums in the United States.