Development of Empathetic Responses With Multicultural Literature

This article reports a case study of a high school teacher's attempt to enhance students' development of empathy after guiding them to explore the cultural, political, and historical context of text. Empathy is defined as an other-oriented perspective that is congruent with another's sociocultural values, political ideology, and historical background. The students who participated in this study grew up in a small town with limited exposure to diversity in their lives and in their school curriculum. During a six-week unit, the teacher used simulation, lecture, poster analysis, and a movie to help students understand the context of a Chinese novella before they read the book. Students engaged in discussion and journal writing when they read the text. The data collected included videorecording of lessons, the investigator's field notes, teacher diary entries, students' assignments, and postinstructional interviews with individual students. The findings suggest that these students demonstrated five types of empathy: cognitive empathy, historical empathy, parallel emotional empathy, reactive emotional empathy, and crosscultural empathy. Students varied in their empathetic responses. Some refused to empathize with the characters; some accepted the characters' positions partially; only a few could and were willing to experience the feelings of the characters.