Empathy and the Other: Difference, Connection, and the Teaching of Writing focuses on the theoretical basis for empathy as a pedagogical concern, adding to important conversations happening in writing studies about how to foster empathetic understanding and practices for teachers and students. It offers ways for higher education classrooms to become sites for the cultivation of a critical form of empathy that can help address the most important challenges of our time.
Drawing on the study of empathy in rhetorical theory and related fields, teacher-scholars from a variety of institutions and backgrounds offer pedagogical rationales and approaches for fostering empathetic, inclusive, and antiracist pedagogies, centered around five key themes related to empathetic teaching: difference, citizenship, storytelling, assessment, and process. A reflective and critical approach to empathetic teaching—as presented by the authors in this collection—can begin to address forces of social division, particularly in the ways we read and write about others. Teaching grounded in empathetic principles can offer students ways of relating to one another across cultural, religious, class, ethnic, political, and ideological differences.
Empathy and the Other is a companion volume to Enacting Empathy: Stories and Strategies from the Writing Classroom, which features vignettes and praxis pieces focused on classroom experiences and reflections on teaching empathy. The two collections may stand alone or be read together and are of great interest to writing teachers and graduate students invested in social justice in the classroom.