Wonder: Another Precursor to Empathy

In the last blog post I was exploring the way in which the cultural hostility to ambiguity might make it difficult for the practice of ambiguity. But what spurred those thoughts was my reading of Tony Wagner's new book Creating Innovators. While I love the ideas that Wagner and others support, my focus always comes back to the practical implementation of these grand ideas. What I have found in my own work with empathy is that the concept of ambiguity is actually a key precursor to being empathetic. If I could foster a deepened understanding of ambiguity as "multi-layeredness," then my students made progress in their ability to understand how someone else constructs the world. The study from the University of Toronto confirmed some of my suspicions about why my students had some severe roadblocks to practicing empathy.

Reflecting on these ideas, it occured to me that a missing link that needed exploration was the role of wondering in the development of empathy. Years ago I was trying to design an opening class that would be fitting for an experience-based program that used the world outside the classroom as both a laboratory and classroom.  What we designed was a "wondering and wandering" expedition based on John Stilgoe's book Outside Lies Magic. (I wrote about this in an earlier blog post.) But I can still remember the face of one student, Rose, as we returned from that first exploration to the parking lot and the campus beyond. There was confusion on her face, but also anger and resentment. It was not until later in the day that I had a chance to catch up with Rose to see what was happening. In halting sentences, she explained that she had felt ashamed and inadequate during the class. I was stunned. I thought we had engineered an "expotition" that Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh would have have been proud of only to realize that it had gone terribly, terribly wrong. But why?


Rose explained that she was embarrassed because she had realized that she didn't "wonder about things." In fact, she explained, she would go along almost every day without wondering at all. At first, I was gobsmacked; the idea seemed completely implausible. But as I talked with Rose it appeared to be true. And I have talked to other students since, they have confirmed that they often go through the day without "wondering." As one student said when I asked him as he was about to go into the Academic Dean's office, "Hey, I have two tests today, SAT prep and I probably won't even start my homework until 10 PM. Wondering is not on my to-do list."

As I often do in cases like this, I looked at the etymology of the word wonder--and there it was. Wonder:  "miracle, portent, horror, monster, object of astonishment." None of these things existed in Rose's life. In fact, she had designed her life (or it had been designed for her) to not contain these concepts. Wondering, I realized, cannot be assumed; it has to be explicitly practiced, modeled, reinforced. And frankly, I am not so sure that we aren't as alienated from the idea of miracle as we are protected from horrors. Nonetheless, I realized that adolescents do not have miracles and monsters in their daily lives the way they used to when they were younger.

Practicing "wondering" on a daily basis might seem somehow silly to some, but as Rachel Carson said in her piece for Woman's Home Companion in July 1956, Help Your Child To Wonder, “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy excitement and mystery of the world we live in." Rachel Carson's particular venue for practicing wonder was the natural world on the coast of Maine, but I have found plenty of miracles and monsters in New York City's "urban jungle."

(A side note: The Environmental Protection Agency in its Aging Initiative has instituted the Rachel Carson Intergenerational Sense of Wonder Contest, though I am not sure Rachel had a contest in mind to preserve our sense of wonder.)

After that class with Rose, I began to monitor the assignments I gave my students for their "wonderment factor." What I found about my own teaching was discouraging, but, I confess, not surprising. I did not have that many assignments that explicitly were designed to engage students in the act of wondering. It was much more likely that I would be asking them to explain, defend, critique and assess the merits of of this or that thing. I was quite good, I found, at getting them to be insightful critics with lots of judgments. But I was not very good at getting them to formally, or even informally, practice wondering. Check your own assignments--to both yourself and your students--and see if the same isn't true for you. 

And while I have not had the courage to put "ability to wonder" on the critical thinking skills checklist at CITYterm, I am much more conscious that I need to activate this skill in order to provoke imaginative acts--like empathy. And, surprise, the more you practice it, the better you get at it.

Walker Percy in his novel The Moviegoer insightfully links the idea of wondering and wandering to the warding off of what I think many people succumb to--despair. Theologically, and educationally, despair is something that occurs when you lose faith in the possibility of wonder. Wondering is what one does naturally when one is on "the search."

Percy's narrator, Binx Bolling, posits that "the search is what anyone would undertake, if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair...And I have lived ever since, solitary and in wonder, wondering day and night, never a moment without wonder. Before I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion."

Going back to Wagner's book, Creating Innovators, one of its features is a series of case studies of individuals who he hails as being truly innovative in one field or another. For his purposes the people he is examining are those who win every fellowship imaginable and invent the I-phone. Wagner is examining a Lake Wobegon on steroids where not only "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average," but they are the strongest, the best looking and the most exceptional.  Nonetheless, what matters here is the role that "wondering" had to do with his subjects ability to be able to imagine.  He tries to ferret out what he thinks are the conditions that made them innovative, and discovers that family and school have essential positive and negative roles. That is what interests me, the ways in which we can use the classroom, and our students' life experiences, to help them cherish the world of wondering and imagining, and lead them toward the deep waters of empathy.

Precursors to Practicing Empathy: The Role of Embracing Ambiguity

I am in the middle of the latest book identifying empathy as a key to innovation--Tony Wagner's Creating Innovators. He is building on, among other things, the design thinking article by Tim Brown from IDEO first seen in the Harvard Business Review in June 2008. Brown, in a fuller explication of those ideas in his book Change by Design, maintains that "empathy is perhaps the most important distinction between academic thinking and design thinking." Daniel Pink, in his 2005 book A Whole New Mind thinks that "empathy is mighty important. It helped our species climb out of the evolutionary muck." In short, empathy has been getting a lot of play lately. And while I personally think that empathy could and should be part of "academic thinking," I am happy that it is being talked about at all. But it is not something that has been thought through from a teaching and learning point of view.

I love the cornucopia of ideas that come from these authors, and I love reading books that affirm what we have been practicing at CITYterm for the past decade or so. Every time I read these books and then I look at the skills assessment sheet that we design our course of study from, I feel encouraged that we are on the right path. My problem with all of these calls for empathy is that there rarely seems to be a hands-on look at HOW one practices empathy. What is the precise plan of action? What does one do in class to make this happen? Or, looking at the problem from a reverse angle --what gets in the way of practicing empathy? What makes it difficult to do?

The way empathy gets talked about in these books, however, reminds me more of a coach I was listening to at a basketball camp one summer who was explaining how to run a fast break. He started his lengthy exposition with these words, "First, assume a rebound..." But, it seems to me, we should spend some time learning how to rebound before we start running fast breaks. If you don't have the skill of getting the ball, it doesn't help to affirm how valuable it is to run a fast break offense.

Or, as my economics professor in college said when asked about the limitations of economists' thought processes in approaching problems replied, "Well, a lot of us (economists) are like a starving sailor stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat, but a whole case of canned tuna fish has washed up next to us. So, we think, 'How shall we solve this problem?' Economists are people who are prone to approach this problem by saying something like, 'First, assume a can opener."


 

In the next few posts, I would like to explore what I think are some of the precursors for the practice of empathy. This particular post will be about one of the antecedents that we can't assume to be there--like the rebound in the basketball game or the can opener on the desert island. In fact, we may live in a culture that is hostile to it.

The very first concept that is important to introduce when you are trying to facilitate someone becoming an experience-based learner is the DKDK zone--what this entire blog is named for. Being able to get yourself into the DKDK zone sets in motion a entire series of cognitive skills that make the learning transformative. When I first started practicing getting students into the confusion and disequilibrium that is the inherent in the DKDK zone, I began to notice that one major obstacle kept short-circuiting the spark that needs to be part of the process. That obstacle was my student's deeply held fear of ambiguity.

 My first reaction is always to trust my student's fears, and then go looking for how I or the culture we all inhabit might be culpable in exacerbating the fears. Self-implication, the ability to see one's own part in a situation (even if it be, as Vivian Gornick writes, "frightened or corwardly or self-deceiving,") is a wonderful opening to seeing those circumstances in a new way. So, try this as an experiment--free associate the word "ambiguity." After you have done that, check the dictionary for definitions. Most people come up with words like--unclear, vague, doubtful, enigmatic, cryptic and uncertain. Certainly, none of these are descriptions that are seen as positives. One dictionary has the following definition, "inexactness of meaning, lack of decisiveness or commitment resulting from a failure to make a choice between alternatives."

But look at other words constructed using the Latin "ambi" or the Greek "amphi." People who are "ambidextrous are not "unclear" about whether they are right or left handed; they are both. (Though, as a side note, "dextrous" means right-handed, so the bias and prejudice against left-handed people is certainly contained in the word.) And as my friend Christopher pointed out to me this week at the Teaching for Experience teacher workshop, people who are "ambivalent" have simultaneous and contradictory attitudes and feelings, they are not inconclusive, irresolute, or unsure. Amphibians can live on both land and in the water; they are not unsure about where to live! And, an amphitheater is one where you can see the stage from multiple angles.

My point is this, the society we live in is fearful of ambiguity and will do anything to resolve the dilemma of something having multiple meanings. If you keep digging in the dictionary, it is only after you get down to some secondary definitions that you come to "capability of having two meanings" (which emerges in the 15th century). Dichotomies reign supreme, but so often in an "either/or" sense and not in a "both/and" sense. Look at the contemporary political and social world and notice how much we avoid complexity in exchange for oversimplification. As H. L. Mencken said, "For every complex problem, there is an answer that is simple, direct and wrong."

And because my students are being culturally trained to fear ambiguity, they are at a huge disadvantage in trying to be empathetic. It is a similar phenomenon to when I discovered that some of my students do not "wonder" at all during the course of a day. It makes "wondering and wandering" a hard skill to practice. In a similar manner, many of my students spend most of their day trying to avoid ambiguity every time they come across it.

In order to be good at empathy, you have be well practiced in contradiction and multiplicity. In short, you have to understand ambiguity and embrace it. This is what I explored in an earlier post on Walt Whitman and his capacity for empathy on a cosmic scale. As Whitman warned us in "Song of Myself, "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Any teacher trying to move their students towards empathy would do well to have a sophisticated theory of what will be the major difficulties on that journey. One of the major difficulties will be embracing ambiguity and having a clear idea idea of where in each lesson this possibility will arise.

Interestingly,  a new study recently released by the University of Toronto addresses this precise problem. Part of the study reads, "Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction:  read more literary fiction.  The study goes on to talk about how reading fiction in certain ways may increase people's capacity for "disorder and uncertainty" and increase "sophisticated thinking and greater creativity." The reader, they conclude, "can simulate the thinking styles of people he or she might personally dislike. One can think along and even feel with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, no matter how offensive one finds this character."

And, in one of those "the world speaks to you" moments that happen in experience-based learning, a friend sent me Joss Wheldon's recent commencement address at Wesleyan University. Toward the end Wheldon's speculates,

"Our culture] is not long on contradiction or ambiguity. … It likes things to be simple, it likes things to be pigeonholed—good or bad, black or white, blue or red. And we’re not that. We’re more interesting than that. And the way that we go into the world understanding is to have these contradictions in ourselves and see them in other people and not judge them for it. To know that, in a world where debate has kind of fallen away and given way to shouting and bullying, that the best thing is not just the idea of honest debate, the best thing is losing the debate, because it means that you learn something and you changed your position. The only way really to understand your position and its worth is to understand the opposite...This connection is part of contradiction. It is the tension I was talking about. This tension isn’t about two opposite points, it’s about the line in between them, and it’s being stretched by them. We need to acknowledge and honor that tension, and the connection that that tension is a part of. Our connection not just to the people we love, but to everybody, including people we can’t stand and wish weren’t around. The connection we have is part of what defines us on such a basic level."

As is often the case in experience-based learning, it is the quality of our relationship (what Wheldon calls the "connection") that is the determining feature of what we learn. How can we learn to endure, even embrace, that tension? If we do that, I believe, we increase our capacity for empathy.

Student Comments on Empathy Protocols: Some Things I Learned

In the last couple of blog posts, I have been exploring the idea of empathy and this spring I designed a more formal protocol that I had students try six times in succession on different pieces of fiction to see what the effect would be. The idea behind doing the protocol so many times in succession is that it enhances the internalization or "muscle memory" that all performers use as they become more expert in their field. The objective is to use the protocol so many times that you don't even think about it anymore--the skill is automatic and tacit. While this did not make me particularly beloved by the students, it did put all of us into the DKDK zone in a good way.

Like most of the cognitive skills experiments I try, they get mixed results. For some students, this opened new ways to see the world and themselves; for other students it felt like homework that was a lot of work for little gain. This makes complete sense to me because we all have such different cognitive gifts.  It seems to me that a main purpose of school ought to be the identification (perhaps "diagnosis," though people tell me that word has too many negative connotations with illness) of the dominant cognitive strengths a student possesses, and then a proposal of strategies for cognitive growth. The goal is clear:  to make a student the "author of his/her own learning.

What follows are parts of three comments from students who had positive experiences with the protocols. After you read them, I want to start an exploration of what might be some of the "cognitive precursors" that would aid in practicing empathy. In other words, for empathy to blossom, it may need some fertile cognitive soil. What needs to be in the soil that will enhance the chances of growth?


From Jared:

To be frank, I hated writing empathy protocols. I have never been a fan of analyzing readings deeply, and I felt like this was forcing us to do that. I have always been the guy to sit down and just enjoy a book with no writing assignments or deep thinking required. Whenever I read anything before, I would take it completely at face value which, in my mind, means that I would look solely at the plot and analyze the chronological order of events and, overall how the book made it from the beginning to the end. It never occurred to me to empathize with the characters and to form a dialogic relationship with the text to try to understand how they see the world and understand how the characters drive the plot and perceive the other people in the story. By understanding how the characters construct their world it adds deeper elements to the plot, particularly it has helped me notice more conflict in text than I was capable of noticing before. Doing these protocols has allowed me to internalize these deeper reading skills as well. However much I hated focusing so much on analyzing readings so deeply, I am now able to subconsciously be more empathetic with characters at a much higher level than I was before. This is an element that I am still trying to work on as I feel that I should be able to relate with all characters that I read about and form a dialogic relationship with, because, after all, I am authoring the story as I read it.

From Maddie:

In the past, reading comprehension seemed to be a never-ending struggle for me. SAT's, Shakespeare, short stories, you name it—they’ve all been unbearably challenging.  For the longest time I felt like I understood assigned readings less than my peers and asked myself questions like: “how did she finish the reading so quickly and get so much more out of it?”  In fact, I had started to lose hope and confidence in myself when it came to reading. Through this process I have learned a lot about myself and how I think.  My mind works in metaphors, I’ve discovered, and I understand characters and plot based off of these metaphors.  Empathy protocols have shown me that by focusing on bettering my strengths, instead of attempting to improve my weaknesses, I am able to grow and make more progress as a learner. 

From Heather:

When I first started writing the empathy protocols, searching for metaphors felt like busy work. I read the chapter and then looked back at my annotations to look for similes or figurative references. This didn’t help me read though, because I was only looking for them so I could fill out the empathy protocol after I finished reading.

By the second empathy protocol, I read with a more “metaphorical lens.” Rather than looking for specific sentences that seemed metaphorical, I looked for patterns. Whenever I identified a word or idea multiple times, I marked it down as the chapter progressed. With this, I was able to put the pieces together. The interesting thing about this is that my assumptions about my metaphors changed as I read on. I would have a premise about the fish, for example, but then when it was brought up again, maybe I saw it differently. With this information, I was able to identify anomalies v. patterns, and then come up with predictions.

Without a doubt I found myself constantly focused on the metaphors. Even when I moved onto steps three and four, I continued to find more metaphors in my search for questions and assumptions. Step two definitely helped my reading the most because when I discovered metaphors/ myths, I would make assumptions and form questions based off of them.

Before CITYterm, when I read I constantly tried to connect with the characters. I felt that if I did not relate to characters, then any connection would be impossible. Through these empathy protocols, however, I have discovered that it is actually more beneficial to connect with metaphors and patterns in the text. By the end of these protocols, I realized that they were everything but busy work. While they ended up taking me at least an hour, I know for a fact that I read differently from now on. By differently I mean more metaphorically. Now, I have to start living my own life story metaphorically!

What Jared highlights in his response is the need for a "dialogic relationship" with the text. And what clearly happened for him was that he went from having an "I-It" relationship with the text to an "I-Thou" relationship.

For Maddie it was literally the realization that she thought in metaphors all the time, and that this was a huge strength when properly channeled. She had been so inculcated with the idea of the act of taking the text apart that she had begun to lose confidence in her ability to read. 

For Heather the whole protocol began to interweave in ways that I had not even considered. When I first started constructing the protocol I was trying for a kind of smorgasbord approach where one step (Deep Listening/Mindfulness/Metaphors) might appeal to one kind of reader and another step (Premises and Assumptions) to another kind of reader. What Heather showed me was that there was a greater connection amongst all of them than I had imagined. And then she took it one step further and began to see the whole approach as one she could apply to her own life. As Sartre once said,--the amazing thing about life is that we are both the author and the main character at the same time.

Empathy and Imelda Marcos: A Protocol

Nikki Giovanni has long been one of my favorite poets, and one of many poets and writers whom I am fascinated by how they do what they do. Initially I thought it had something to do with faith and belief--because Nikki Giovanni BELIEVES what she is writing--but then I came across the following quote:

"I resent people who say writers write from

experience.  Writers don’t write from experience,

though many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. I

want to be clear about this.  If you wrote from

experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three

poems.  Writers write from empathy."

One of the principles about reading that I have been testing for years is that reading and writing are more intimately connected than people think. Now, I know this is not revolutionary, right? But look at Nikki Giovanni's quote again. If that principle is true, and writers write from empathy, then readers ought to read from empathy. Then, obviously, teachers ought to teach how to read empathically. This is something that I have been talking with teachers about now for a couple of decades, but aside from material on role-playing as a way to increase an empathetic sensibility, I haven't found much.

I had been working on some ideas about "precursors" to empathy (that will perhaps become a later blog post), and then began to see that, for many people, protocols worked well as a harbinger of internalized behavior. Could I develop an "empathy protocol" that I could experiment with on the literature I was teaching this spring?


 At about the time I was implementing this protocol, CITYterm had the chance to see Here Lies Love in the previews stage of production at the Public Theater. This production, put together by musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim and directed by Alex Timbers is an immersive theatrical experience that "deconstructs the astonishing journey of First Lady Imelda Marcos from her meteoric rise to power and subsequent descent into infamy and disgrace." While it is an amazing show that has been extended three times, and it was fascinating to watch David Byrne walking around all in white (with matching hair) taking notes throughout, it was the "pre-talk" with Alex Timbers that gave me the most pause to ponder how one creates empathy.

One of the questions that one of the students asked was precisely that--how does an author enter so deeply into Imelda Marcos' head that they could believe they understood her and make the audience believe that as well?

Alex's response (from my cribbed notes) was something like this, "Well, we started by avoiding the obvious cliches of her shoe fetish which might have flattened her; it was too much of a heavy handed symbol and a judgment on her. We were exploring. So one thing that emerged was her love of disco and Studio 54. And the techno-club music became a kind of metaphor for the totalitarian kind of rhythm but also the kind of euphoria of the dance club was the kind of euphoria of being in power."

At this point another student asked, "But how do you know where to start?"

Alex responded, "Well, in this case, we went back to the beginning. To certain assumptions she had about life right from the start. And those assumptions frequently took the form of questions she asked herself--Is it a sin to love too much? Is it a sin to care? and, ultimately, Why don't you love me? That is the question that drove her."

"How do you come up with these metaphors, assumptions and questions?" I asked.

"Actually much of it is kind of intuitive at first. They come to you after you have immersed yourself, but then you start to look at them critically to see if they actually work together to give you a full sense of who she is." Alex ended, and we headed up to the show. On the way up the stairs one of the students asked me, "Did you pay him to say that stuff?"

In asking this question the student was making reference to the "empathy protocol" that the class had been using to explore some short stories the week before. What follows below is the exact "empathy protocol" the students received in class:

                                                 How to practice EMPATHY?

                                                       A Beginners guide

To start with:

For now, let’s start with a definition that views empathy as "the capacity to imagine the thoughts and feelings of the inner life of another person—deeply understanding how someone else constructs the world.” In order to practice empathy you obviously have to be able to change your perspective, but you also have to try to see the world the way the other person ”constructs” it. When we construct the world we have certain feelings, certain thoughts, certain metaphors and myths that are the foundations of our world, and we also access and apply our past experience.

Empathy is, almost by definition, an act of the imagination.  You are not another person; you are you.  Therefore, practicing empathy may be more like calculus than algebra.  You are trying to get as close as you can to the objective, but you will probably never completely reach it. Everyone says, "imagination is more important than knowledge”—let’s see if that is true.

Finally, empathy is the ability to inhabit someone else’s way of constructing the world—intellectually, emotionally, psychologically and physically.

What skills might help us do this?

1) Avoid Judgment: I bring this up only because we are so conditioned to be judgmental (in good and bad ways). I wonder, in fact, if this is the goal of high school and our prime way of being in the world? Being judgmental does NOT help, however, in being empathetic.

2) Deep Listening/Mindfulness/Metaphors: Be fully present when you are trying to be someone else. Prepare yourself to listen for the METAPHORS that are the foundation of how this character constructs the world. The premise here is that we have "metaphors we live by" that are foundational. These may take the form of stories, mottos, slogans, or myths. They will be revealed in what the character does and does not say, by their actions, and sometimes by the most nuanced of gestures. Some of them may be explicitly stated, but, oftentimes, they will be embedded and only implicit.

3) Group Identity Identifiers: We think of ourselves as individuals, but also a members of different groups.  Being empathetic would require being aware of the degree and intensity of the identification on the part of any given individual on a given occasion. Are there groups (race, gender, religion, nationality, geography, age, sexual orientation, etc) that are particularly important to this character in constructing how they see the world? When does the character see themselves as an individual? When as a member of a group?

4) Premises and Assumptions: Premises are foundational beliefs that we are aware that we hold; assumptions, however, are often more deeply embedded and we are unaware that we hold them. However, both premises and assumptions can be inferred and deduced from people’s words and behaviors. Sometimes these are individual to the particular person, but sometimes they are group assumptions. For example, to be an American is to have internalized the children's story of The Little Engine That Could. The culture inculcates a sense of, "I think I can, I think I can."

5) Questions characters are asking themselves: We are all in the process of asking ourselves different questions as we live our lives. What are the questions your character is asking? The trick here is to be really precise in your phrasing of the question(s) you think they are asking.

The Role of Intuition in practicing Empathy:

Don’t think of yourself as trying to “answer” these questions that might pop up. Think instead of being spontaneous.  This will allow you to tap the creative unconscious part of your mind to develop.  Don’t “analyze” the data you have collected to answer it, just answer it.  We can then, later on, see if it seems to be accurate.  The paradox is that the more you know from your protocol, the more you can “forget” it and just “be the other person.”


I am off to start what will be wonderful week exploring at the Teaching for Experience workshop we run each summer, but in the next blog post I will discuss some reactions and responses that I got from students about this process. It certainly did not work for everyone; but for some people it became a very powerful reading technique that produced some remarkable results. 

A Second Look at Empathy

When I was in graduate school I came across the journals of the Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard. I had been teaching for three years, and had reached that point where, as someone new to that profession, you are really quite unsure of what you are doing. To be sure, I was getting better at what I was doing, but I had no foundation that I could identify as providing both focus and direction. And then I came across the following lines, “If real success is to attend the effort to bring a person to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find him where he is and begin there.  This is the secret of helping others…in order to help another effectively I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him…Instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way in which he understands it.”

In short, teaching begins with empathy, not with knowledge. It is, by definition, an imaginative act because I will never be the student I am instructing. All the accumulated knowledge that I acquire and seek to transmit will be worthless unless I first put myself in the place of the student. And, in a stroke of true subtle genius on Kierkegaard's part, I must understand not only WHAT the student understands, but HOW she understands it.

For decades now this has been a kind of mantra that has given me both a focus and a direction, but recently I have begun to think that there is a precursor to what Kierkegaard is exploring. There is a step I must take before I try to empathize with my students.

I am in the process of putting together a protocol that my students might use to practice empathy as a cognitive skill. But I find myself running into a couple of questions that seem to be precursors to being able to do that. My immediate question is this, "Is it possible that empathy is so hard to practice because we actually don't have an accurate and precise sense of how WE feel, much less trying to figure out how someone else feels?" And then, "How would I know how I feel?" 

For a few years now I have been experimenting with the following hypothesis-- "What we know most deeply, we know in our bodies." As I was seeking other people's thoughts about this idea, a friend of mine told me about the concept of  "Focusing." 

Focusing is the name given to a psychotheraputic process developed by a University of Chicago psychotherapist named Eugene Gendlin. It originated in some research trying to determine when psychotherapy was effective and when it was not. Gendlin and his team watched tapes of people in therapeutic sessions and became remarkably accurate in being able to predict which patients would find positive outcomes. The key was not in the techniques of the therapist; the key was whether or not the patient checked in with themselves about what their body was telling them during the sessions. (Interestingly, Maya Angelou touches, so to speak, on this very idea:  “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”)

Here are the first three steps in the six step program that Gendlin developed to re-create the successful patient behavior:

1) Clearing a Space

What I will ask you to do will be silent, just to yourself. Take a moment just to relax . . . All right – now, inside you, I would like you to pay attention inwardly, in your body, perhaps in your stomach or chest. Now see what comes there when you ask, "How is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?" Sense within your body. Let the answers come slowly from this sensing. When some concern comes, DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back, say "Yes, that’s there. I can feel that, there." Let there be a little space between you and that. Then ask what else you feel. Wait again, and sense. Usually there are several things.

2) Identifying a Felt Sense

From among what came, select one personal problem to focus on. DO NOT GO INSIDE IT. Stand back from it. Of course, there are many parts to that one thing you are thinking about – too many to think of each one alone. But you can feel all of these things together. Pay attention there where you usually feel things, and in there you can get a sense of what all of the problem feels like. Let yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that.

3) Getting a Handle


 What is the quality of this unclear felt sense? Let a word, a phrase, a gesture, a metaphor or an image come up from the felt sense itself. It might be a quality-word, like tight, sticky, scary, stuck, heavy, jumpy or a phrase, or an image. Stay with the quality of the felt sense till something fits it just right.

I did this process the other day with myself with a problem that I am having trying to work with some students about an ethical issue. What I discovered surprised me, and I have been exploring it for the past few days.

My felt sense was in my throat--very clearly. And as I tried to describe it more the phrase "stuck in my craw" kept emerging. There is something fundamentally annoying or rankling or angering that sticks in my throat about this situation. Gendlin is right--my body is literally telling me that before I go on to try to understand what my students understand and how they understand it, I had better understand myself first.

 And so, I have added a precursor to what Kierkegaard has taught me: self-compassion. If I am going to be empathetic toward my students, as Kiekegaard directs, I need to recognize my own "suffering"  and be kind to it. In the world of Mindfulness practice, suffering is considered to be when one has pain of some kind - in my case, it turned out to be the experience of feeling frustration and anger - and then judgments about having those feelings compound the pain into suffering. Once I was able to validate that I did feel angry and was able to accept it and not judge it, I entered the realm of self-compassion. This has allowed me to be prepared to be empathetic and I can move on to helping my students. But I needed Focusing to get the phrase that would give me the handle to know with some precision and accuracy what I am feeling. More evidence for my hypothesis about what we know most deeply we know in our bodies.  Happy Easter.

Empathy: Opening Thoughts on the Use of Metaphor

I remember walking with my younger son one day when he was only four or five and looking down at his face and seeing that something was not quite right. So, I turned to ask him how he felt. He replied, “I feel sad.” At that moment I realized I had no idea how he really felt. What did “sad” mean?  Was it anxious? Depressed? Hungry? Isolated? Was he a miniature Hamlet who just didn’t know the word “melancholy” yet? The parent in me also felt sad because I deeply wanted to know how my son was feeling in the moment, and I felt...well, could I give a label to how I felt?

And so I began to listen more carefully to how the people around me were describing how they were feeling. What I noticed was that young children kept using metaphors and analogies to describe their feelings, and my students and my colleagues used abstract generalizations. The latter would say things like, "I am so stressed out." But the former would say things like, "I feel like the way the duckling in the pond on Boston Common did when she was looking around for her mother and couldn't see her because she was behind the long grass." 

And what I realized was that I always had a better understanding of how the children felt than I did of how the adults felt. In fact, I began to realize that the language itself was actually causing part of the problem. As we grew older we substituted abstractions for metaphors and, in the process, distanced ourselves from what we were truly feeling. 

And so I began to create "metaphor practice" in my classes. We would all create a metaphor about a time in the past 24 hours where we had experienced a complicated emotion. Like this one I still remember, "You know the cans of Ready Whip that you shake up and then you press the spout and it makes this sound like a rushing wind or a tidal wave and billows of foam come out, but then after you use a lot of the can you start to hear the hollow metallic ping of the whippet of nitrous oxide that is inside the can and then you press the spout and it is this thin, dribbling sound and you just get runny gunk-- I feel like that."

And what we would do is unpack the metaphor. You can try it with the Ready Whip one; it is remarkably rich. What we discovered is that we all (the metaphor creator included) came to a much fuller understanding of how each of us felt. There has been a great deal written about "role playing" as a way to teach people to be more empathetic, but I have been thinking that metaphor actually provides a simpler, more immediate and less complicated way to accomplish the same thing. 

 

 At this point I tried to see if I could attach metaphors to the experience of being in some of my colleagues' classes. (You can do this with your own as well, but it is easier to ask your own students. What you discover will surprise and amaze you, I guarantee.) There was one history teacher who taught class like Teddy Roosevelt going up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish- American war. There was an assembling of the troops, a pep talk about mission and purpose, an exhortation about attitude--and then, a full scale, high energy half an hour frontal charge at the topic where some of the troops fell by the wayside on the way up and were left for dead. But the ones who made it to the top were delirious, much more alive than they had felt forty minutes before.

Or the English teacher whose class was like playing the old 1960's Milton Bradely game of Operation. In that game you get a pair of tweezers and you have to remove the "Adam's apple" or the "wrenched ankle" or the "Charlie horse" from a cavity in the board (there were lots of metaphors in this game). The patients parts, however, were electrified so if you were quite dexterous and had well developed small motor skills you were rewarded with money for removing the infected part. But if you were not and your tweezers hit the side of the electrified opening, then a buzzer sounded and you lost your turn. The class was, truly, electrifying.

At about this time a book emerged by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson entitled Metaphors We Live By, and I started to teach a course whose "final exam" was the creation of a set of metaphors that represented the embedded foundation upon which each individual actually based their world-view. Lakoff and Johnson were interested in the broad sweeps of figuring out what was valued by a society by looking at their metaphors. (For example, "Time is money" - a very rich metaphor to mine! If "mining" is in fact, the metaphor you want to use for. You come to realize that metaphor is everywhere once you start listening carefully.)

Ultimately, this deeper awareness and exploration of metaphor can be a foundational cognitive skill for transmitting a larger life skill that can't be taught in traditional ways: empathy.
(to be further discussed).

The Third Thing: How do we Tell the Dancer from the Dance?

William Butler Yeats wrote on of my favorite poems titled, probably appropriately, "Among School Children." Yeats' meditation ends with the following lines,

"O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we tell the dancer from the dance?"

I always love the fact that Yeats wrote this after walking through a Montessori school in Dublin and while he is obviously ruminating on life at sixty years old (this poem is particularly poignant and inspiring for me as I have just turned sixty myself), I think he hits upon a fundamental truth about creativity in those last lines. There is a unity between the dancer and the dance that provokes an inseparable oneness. When is what we are watching "the dancer" and when is what we are watching "the dance" becomes impossible to tell.

And in the last month we have had three authorship seminars at CITYterm that have led me to ponder how that that oneness occurs, and perhaps how we can create it ourselves.

Three weeks ago we had a seminar with writer Amy Waldman, author of the novel The Submission. During the course of the dialogue one student asked about whether there had been any epiphanies that she had experienced during the writing of the book and why she thought they had occurred. Her response was to describe how she had been walking down the street one day and wondering why one particular character was so cliched and ineffective when "it suddenly occurred to me that she needed a sex change! That was the problem, the character told me--she was a man. So Lucy became Sean, and everything began to flow again. I just had to listen to what she was telling me."



Last week we attended a performance of the play, Sleep No More, in a 10,000 square foot theater, five stories high in Chelsea. The play goes on for three hours but no spectator's play is the same because it is constructed as a giant "choose you own adventure story" that takes place in countless rooms of a hotel with characters from the play running from room to room performing different scenes. Which means, on some level, you are no longer just a spectator, you are creating the play yourself because you are making some of the creative choices. In the authorship seminar following Tori Sparks ("Lady Macbeth") was asked a question by a student about how the play changes for her as an actress precisely because she has to respond to choices made by the audience. She replied, "There are times when I am acting but I am also watching the audience do something I have never seen them do before, and I have to decide why they are doing that and how should I respond."

And then the other day the production team of a One Child Born: The Music of Laura Nyro came to give a performance for us. This is a one woman show, but there are eight different characters who make appearances during the performance. In the seminar after the show, Kate, Adrienne and Louis (the singer, director and writer) were asked about how the show had come into being. What became clear as they talked, however, was that the show was still "coming into being." What was most remarkable was that they talked about the show as though it were a living thing--something that had a life of its own and was itself making decisions which way it was going with every performance. They even talked about lines that had emerged just for the performance we had just seen.

What had happened in all of these seminars was that each of the authors, in totally different mediums, had created something that was independent of their control. Amy was creating characters, but they were telling her what to do. Tori had a script, but the audience was helping her enact it. Kate had a musical show but it was morphing with every performance in ways that were not her conscious choice.

Each of them had created what my friend Eder has dubbed, "the third thing." The third thing is the relationship that gets created when the artist both talks to but also listens to, what is being created.

If you do this well enough, you really cannot tell the dancer from the dance because what was once a separate dichotomy has become a synergistic whole. That is what Yeats saw at the end of his life--you cannot tell the dancer from the dance, if that relationship exists.  But, the paradox is that you have to create the "third thing"--the relationship--before you can get that unity.


 

Last night, as I was mulling these ideas over, the movie that appeared on the screen was Top Hat with Fred Astaire. And there on my TV screen was the literal visual representation of what Yeats was talking about--the dichotomy had become a unity. So, I did a little research on how Fred Astaire developed his dancing technique and his relationship to it.

First, I looked for what Ginger Rodgers might say about working with him. As she described it, "Sometimes he'll think of a new line of dialogue or a new angle for the story ... they never know what time of night he'll call up and start ranting enthusiastically about a fresh idea ... No loafing on the job on an Astaire picture, and no cutting corners."

And then for what Fred Astaire himself said,  "For maybe a couple of days we wouldn't get anywhere—just stand in front of the mirror and fool around... Then suddenly I'd get an idea or one of them would get an idea... So then we'd get started... You might get practically the whole idea of the routine done that day, but then you'd work on it, edit it, scramble it, and so forth. It might take sometimes as long as two, three weeks to get something going."

Often I think that one of the hardest parts of teaching experience-based learning is that have to figure out how to generate and tap into the "third thing." It is not enough to teach just how to dance, you have to figure out how to end in a place where no one can tell the difference between the dancer and the dance.