Actively Building Empathy for English Learners

Pauli Badenhorst, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), Edinburg, TX, USA

Demographic Reality

A growing demographic, English learners (ELs) – or students whose home or first language is a language other than English – constitute over 10.6% of the K-12 public school population in the U.S, a local case hosting general implications for language learning contexts globally dispersed. Their home languages are most often Spanish (76.4%), Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian, Haitian, and Hmong among multiple others. Pennsylvania’s public schools, for instance, host ELs from more than two hundred non-English home and first language backgrounds. Additionally, across the U.S., more than nine-out-of-ten ELs belong to racial and ethnic minority communities with over three-quarters of students being Hispanic (77.9%), 9.7% Asian, and 4.2% Black (NCES, 2024). The varieties of languages represented by EL students correspond with a heterogeneity of cultural and racial backgrounds and experiences, and so novice – and even experienced – language teachers need to continually develop our capacities to teach and work alongside ELs in contexts where human differences abound.

Wellness is Vital to English Learner Being and Learning

One such durable capacity is the ability to support and nurture their academic success by be[com]ing more mindful of and responsive to their language and cultural experiences and concerns. Santa Ana (2004), for example, provides a collection of firsthand narrative accounts of the adverse psycho-emotional impact that neglect of EL language and cultural sense of belonging within contexts of schooling has for both the academic and social experiences of young people and children. In addition to pressures that often include the need to learn new cultural ways of communicating and relating plus complex linguistic systems of text, speech, and thought alongside subject-area content within a high-stakes academic environment, ELs are also undergoing impressionable socialization and age-approximate developmental changes. ELs therefore deal with multiple stressors and so the academic and personal wellbeing of ELs is of common concern to novice teachers, but also more experienced teachers, curriculum writers, school administrators, and education policymakers. Additionally, those life experiences and forms of knowledge ELs embody as strengths are significant and transferable to how we support them in their learning of both English language and academic content. Unfortunately, however, ELs report often feeling that their home, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds and needs have been excluded in their experiences of public school curriculum and instruction (Badenhorst et al., 2024). It is only reasonable then that educators should know how to effectively teach in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts.

Actively Building Teacher Empathy for English Learners

In reality, a persistent and increasing demographic and cultural-knowledge gap exists between educators and students in contemporary U.S. schools. Consequently, as novice and experienced teachers, we would do well to learn the ELs we teach – about them as individuals and members of families and communities, their past experiences and insights, present interests and challenges, and future dreams and aspirations. Learning our culturally and linguistically diverse students for instance requires moving beyond exotic, superficial 5F (foods, flags, fashions, famous people, and festivals) representations of their complex historical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Building our capacity for deep empathy is one such avenue for learning at a depth akin to the larger submerged chunk of the proverbial iceberg – a deep dive beneath the surface, so to speak. Empathy (Wiseman, 1996; Krznaric, 2014) is “the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions” (Krznaric, 2014, p. x). Empathy corresponds with “outrospection”, the idea of better discovering who you are and how to live by stepping outside yourself and exploring the lives and perspectives of other people and so is both a feeling and a theory of mind. Taken from the original Greek empathos, it means feeling “in” or inside another, connecting with their deepest feelings through our own. Empathy is also a capacity that can daily be built within the self. Here, Krznaric (2014) offers some helpful directions for growing greater empathy:

• Recognizing that we have a choice to grow our empathy
• Consciously “stepping into” the life-worlds of others
• Exploring lives and cultures that contrast with our own
• Fostering curiosity about strangers through listening and making ourselves vulnerable
• Learning about others both interpersonally and through art, literature, and film
• Generating empathy for social change (p. xv)

Likewise, Wiseman (1996) lists several compatible pathways toward be[com]ing more empathic:

• Striving to see the world through the perspectives of others
• Suspending judgement
• Connecting with another’s feelings through our own
• Communicating our understanding of another’s feelings (p. 1165)

How can we practically implement some of these suggested characteristics and practices in our own personal and professional contexts? Can you think of practical examples for yourself? These questions offer a helpful starting point. That said, while empathy-building is integral to a caring profession like teaching, yielding healthy and reparative insights and more socially-attuned and resonant ways of relating to others, including our EL students, it requires ongoing and mindful practice. This can be challenging to accomplish alongside those stressful professional demands and expectations inhering teaching, especially early career. Lack of time and elevated stress are but two widely experienced disruptive challenges among many. To this end, it is helpful to frame our enlarging capacity for empathy, not as an additional “mechanical” task merely serving some abstract or instrumental purpose, but rather as an opportunity for deep, meaningful interaction and human intimacy (in-to-me-see) across lines of differences in background and life experience. In contemporary times where standardized testing impinges upon those more relationally responsive and inventive forms of teaching often desired by teachers, expanding the reach of our capacity for empathy offers both novice and experienced teachers access to the more meaningful relational affordances of teaching. Additionally, during times in which social media and politically-engineered divisions are further isolating humans from opportunities for authentic connection, developing greater empathy offers a practical alternative to despair, apathy, or anger, simultaneously reducing stress; constituting meaningful investment of time and awareness.

The Transformative Work of Making the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange

The language, ethnic, and racial cultural backgrounds of our ELs remain significantly relevant to their academic success and personal wellbeing, a reality requiring that both novice and experienced teachers learn our students – as deeply as we desire them to learn from our teaching. Actively building our knowledge and empathy of students is one way to embark on this learning process. Taking intentional steps toward building greater empathy for our students, as an active and ongoing process of learning, will help avoid some of the academic and social pitfalls referred to earlier. We cannot blindly assume that our students’ experiences, values, and beliefs are the same as our own or take at face value stereotyped popular media portrayals of their complex lives and cultures. Greater empathy building then is akin to the exciting process of best learning others as described by Horace Miner, a famous scholar and learner of cultures, several decades ago – the task of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. This also implies scrutinizing our negative assumptions and beliefs about others, what these are, where these come from, and how these correspond with the lived realities of others. In so doing, we may come to recognize and confront aspects of ourselves that distort more realistic perceptions of others. We may also, hopefully, become more aware of inequalities and injustices inhering the institutional schooling contexts within which we work, actively advocating, participating, and supporting to bring about changes that benefit our EL students and communities.

References

Badenhorst, P., Musanti, S., Estrada, V., Robles, P., & Montoya, A. (2023). Community-engaged pedagogy for equitable HSI teacher preparation: Bridging community, school, and university cultures. Journal of Latinos and Education, 23(2), 812-828. DOI: 10.1080/15348431.2023.2184371

Krznaric, R. (2014). Empathy: Why it matters, and how to get it. Perigee.

NCES (National Centre for Education Statistics). (2024). English learners in public schools. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf/english-learners#fr8

Santa Ana, O. (2004). Tongue-tied: The lives of multilingual children in public education. Rowman & Littlefield.

Wiseman, T. (1996). A concept analysis of empathy. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 23(6), 1162-1167. DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-2648.1996.12213.x

Pauli Badenhorst is an associate professor in the Teaching & Learning department at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. A teacher educator and education researcher who has taught and worked across four continents, Pauli was formerly an English language teacher. His transnational school and society-focused research engages race as an overdetermined discourse of human difference, investigating the emergence of our raced beliefs about selves and others along co-constitutive social and psychological lines. He asks, How are our beliefs about racial self / Other and internal emotion work co-constituted?