丁香园AV

A common refrain when trying to be considerate of others is to 鈥減ut yourself in their shoes.鈥� But education professor Ann Chinnery says there鈥檚 a flaw in that line of thinking.

Chinnery says that when we do that, we鈥檙e actually projecting our own thoughts and feelings onto someone else and may not truly understand what that person may be feeling.

This Wednesday, April 5, Chinnery will speak on our ethical responsibility to each other鈥攁nd how to re-think prevailing practices鈥攁s part of the  丁香园AV President鈥檚 Faculty Lecture Series.

丁香园AV News took a moment to ask Chinnery some questions leading up to her lecture:

You criticize the use of empathy in the classroom. What worries you about using empathy as a basis for caring for others?

Empathy is currently popular in schools and society in general. The belief is that if you can see another person as basically just like yourself, you will be motivated to do for them what you would want others to do for you in that situation.

The problem with this is that it puts too much of a burden on the other person to make their life intelligible to me so that I can see the similarity between us.

Educators may say 鈥業 don鈥檛 see my students as brown or black or white, or Jewish or Muslim鈥擨 just see them all as children.鈥� But if a student鈥檚 identity is fundamentally tied to their race or religion, there鈥檚 an unintentional erasing of how that child sees themself in the world.
 

How do you see teaching and education developing over the next five to 10 years?

There鈥檚 a trend towards distance education and online learning. But I want to push back and say we need to spend more time being together in shared physical space.

By hanging out and spending time together we can learn to experience and appreciate our similarities and differences. We can come to appreciate each other in a way that doesn鈥檛 require someone else to be 鈥榣ike me鈥�.

As difficult as it is, I think we need to have what philosopher Judith Butler calls experiences of 鈥榰p-againstness鈥� in order to encounter the other鈥檚 strengths, and their fragility and weakness鈥攔egardless of whether we have anything in common.

We risk losing something important about what it means to be human when we lose that physical contact.
 

What do you think are some of the most pressing issues that new teachers will face in their careers today or in the future?

One of the biggest challenges teachers face is to truly be the kind of caring teacher they want to be when there are so many students with different needs in one classroom.

There鈥檚 a feeling of being overwhelmed with so many responsibilities being downloaded on to schools, in addition to students鈥� diverse needs.

It鈥檚 not that teachers lack the will鈥攖hey don鈥檛 have sufficient resources. Because of this, we inevitably end up reducing kids to categories in order to get by, which is not what teachers have been educated to do, nor what they want to do.