Michelle Devereaux is an Associate Professor 
of English and English Education at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Her work is heavily influenced by her five years as a high school English teacher. In 2018/2019, Michelle was a Fulbright Scholar at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. Passionate about excellence in teaching, Michelle helped to train American Fulbright English Teaching Assistants in the Czech Republic and their local colleagues while on her grant. In this blog post, Michelle reflects on the past year of teaching mostly in the virtual world and on the lessons of critical empathy that she has learned from her students.
We had done everything right. We had researched, planned, drafted, and then researched again. We had received permissions and signed forms. Our academic unit was done. The 10th grade classroom and its teacher were both ready to go. 
The curricular unit on Global Englishes was our brain child. We hadn’t found any previous research that had focused on how U.S. teenagers would grapple with the concept of Global Englishes, both the linguistic and sociolinguistic angles as well as the complicated truths about how English as a lingua franca manifests across the globe.
And then, the first day of our unit, March 17, 2020, became the first day that all public schools in the state of Georgia went online due to the COVID pandemic. It was a mad dash of re-planning and re-envisioning our perfect little unit. But we pushed through. Our two-week unit turned into a five-week unit as student participation increased, despite the online environment.
After the unprecedented school year ended, I began reading and rereading students’ work from the unit over the course of the summer, and an interesting theme emerged. A significant portion of the students showed an increase in empathy. These American teenagers, some for the first time, began considering not only English across the globe, but what it meant for English to be the language of capitalist power and production. As the American students discussed language and power and place, pronouns shifted from singular (me and I) to plural (we and us). Students began grappling with the costs associated with lost languages and cultures due to the force of English in the economy and mainstream entertainment. They began working to understand the places and the people who interacted with English as a second (or third or fourth) language.
When I first realized the students’ increased empathy, I immediately thought of the Atticus Adage from the American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In that book, the father, Attitcus, tells his daughter, Scout, that you don’t really know a man until you get in his skin and crawl around, a distinctly American Southern interpretation of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes.” Throughout most of my life, this was how I had come to understand empathy. It was pretty easy. Consider another person’s perspective. Cool. Done.
But as I’ve gotten older, and learned, and traveled, and spoken with folks, I realized that the Atticus Adage is a comfortable and easy answer to a difficult question. Being empathetic isn’t just about considering someone else’s point of view. That just makes for, maybe, a nicer world, but not a better world.
Michelle runs an interactive workshop for Czech high school teachers at the Faculty of Education of Charles University in Prague, May 2019. (Michelle smiles with her arm up in the air, signaling to fellow teachers during an interactive classroom activity.)
What does it mean to truly be empathetic?
In my research on empathy, I found a framework that worked for me: empathy as translation (see Pedwell, 2016). When someone translates a work from one language to another, it isn’t enough to merely translate the words. (This would be the easy empathy I talked about earlier, the Atticus Adage.) If you just translate the words in a text, you’re missing out on the important stuff. A good translator considers the social, political, and historical context of the work in order to create a fair translation. This is a critical translation, honoring the context of the words, not simply the words themselves. Likewise, Pedwell argues that we should move to a critical empathy, one that honors the social, political, and historical context of experiences.
Critical empathy isn’t an easy task. It forces folks to grapple with difficult questions about truth and equity.
What made this topic all the more interesting to me is that I was learning about critical empathy in the year 2020: the year of Black Lives Matter, hate crimes towards Asian-Americans (due to powerful people calling COVID the China Virus, among other names), the year of a contentious presidential election, and lines drawn in the cement over political beliefs. It was a year where my students were struggling more than they ever had, a year when my sister turned inside herself, tired (like so many others) of the isolation and the low-hum of fear associated with the pandemic.
And here I was, learning about critical empathy. The landscape of 2020 offered hard questions when it came to critical empathy, ones I didn’t always have the answers to.
How is the Black Lives Matter movement propelled by the power structures that historically favor white Americans? How are the hate crimes against Asian-Americans situated in the political history of the Japanese internment camps of WWII? How does the media (both liberal and conservative) privilege their political and social beliefs through naming people and groups (with nouns) and assigning those people and groups actions (with action verbs)? How do we practice self-care so that we can help others? When is it okay to be selfish?
Like all of my research, I talk with my university students about what I’ve learned and what I’m learning. It is amazing how often they make me consider a position I hadn’t previously considered. Although most of my students are twenty years my junior, their youth and experience with the world offers important perspectives. So I was eager to discuss the idea of critical empathy with them, again, particularly in 2020.
I wish I could say that my students provided the clear context and the easy answers. I wish I could end this post with some beautiful conclusion that gives a perfectly packaged answer to how we live in a framework of critical empathy. But alas. I am still in process. However, within this process, I have learned a few things, and I can share those here.
We often think we are the ones who deserve more empathy. That is an easy answer. But here are some tough questions instead: How can we offer more empathy towards those who aren’t like us? Towards those with whom we don’t agree? Those whose perspective is different than ours?
Critical empathy is messy and it can leave us feeling confused because it has the potential to reshape our views on the world. And let’s be honest--that’s uncomfortable. But when we make the jump from working to understand someone’s story to working to understand the context of that other person’s life, we gain a better understanding of our own.
Listening is key. In my field of linguistics, there’s a lot of research on “the listening subject” and how most folks aren’t really listening but are just waiting for their turn to talk. I think an important step to learning critical empathy is this: actively listening to what other folks are saying--not listening just to argue their point or to tell them they’re wrong, but unabashed listening. You don’t always have to speak.
I think it’s pretty amazing that I learned about critical empathy during 2020. I think it's also pretty amazing that it was a group of 15 year-old students that first got me thinking about it. As adults, I think we underestimate the depth of adolescents. It is nice to be reminded that there’s a lot to learn from them, and a lot to grapple with.
Works Cited
Devereaux, M. D., Palmer, C. C., & Thompson, V. E. (2021). Pandialectal learning: Teaching global Englishes in a tenth-grade English class. American Speech, 96(2), 235-252.
https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-9089613
Pedwell, C. (2016). De-colonising empathy: Thinking affect transnationally. Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies, 16(1) 27-49. https://doi.org/
10.1057/9781137275264