Pedagogy, Empathy and Praxis by Alison Grove O’Grady

Author:Alison Grove O’Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030395261
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Empathy as Habituated Practice

Scholars such as Larocco (2017) discuss empathy as an orientation not a form of motivation. Empathy and the act of empathising is not a natural act for every person and may not ‘engage the other’s alterity at all’ (p. 13). How a student or teacher performs empathy or an empathic act can be dependent on their emotional repertoire and their sympathy towards the question or concern they face. An ideal outcome of the applied practice of empathy is that it becomes reflexive, critical, habituated and inherent in the way we behave in the world.

So, what does empathy as a habit of mind look like? Far from a spurious and lofty ideal, creating a climate and condition for the flourishing of empathic practices and students as natural empaths means building upon already well-trodden ways of learning and using learned beliefs to critique the familiar, in a safe space. Schools and educational institutions have been the vessel for character education or morality building, whether they have acknowledged and/or embraced that charge or not. Those schools in the religious tradition and independent of state educational bodies pronounce habits of character or character formation in their prospectus and pedagogy. A habit of pedagogy is less familiar and requires a challenge to firm beliefs and is often risky.

Habits are hard to break and easier to assume or take up. Dewey (1922) talks about habit as something that requires reaching down to the very nature of who we are and thinking about facing loss (perhaps cultural, personal, spiritual) regularly in order to increase sensitivity. Alice Miller refers to ‘poisonous pedagogies’, a term she uses to describe the way we teach students to accept the status quo by not allowing them to notice the immediate threats to their agency and dominion in the classroom. To create empathy as a habit of mind, I borrow from Greene (1995) and the work of those scholars in the field of drama and theatre, particularly Stanislavski (1949), to nurture empathy as a habit by ‘disturbing the familiar and making the familiar strange’. Relying on the traditions of theatre and drama-rich pedagogies, initial teacher education programmes can offer training teachers methods to engender humanity in their classrooms and enrich their own teacher artistry. The following chapter describes the action and applied nature of the pedagogy in practice.

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