I was recently offered an Assistant Professor job in a (mostly) online sustainability-focused doctoral programme in the US state university system. The position had much going for it. Most important to me was that my would-be colleagues were passionate, caring, thoughtful, and open-minded, and that I would have a lot of opportunities to develop my subject of interest. At the time, I was on a precarious one-year teaching contract in a programme at University of Edinburgh where I felt a bit out of place, often giving courses to teach well outside my area of knowledge or concern, and to deliver these courses in ways that did not make sense to me. I also felt constricted in what was possible. The programme at the American university was emergent and developmental, which really suits my preference for fluid co-evolution between teaching, curriculum, and students. By contrast, a favourite moaning point amongst colleagues in Edinburgh is that this university is highly bureaucratic and managerial. Forget allowing space for ambiguity and emergence! Even proposing course changes is such an elaborate affair that few bother to do it. Hence a culture of firing through unchanged powerpoint slides in courses year to year.
I was heading to class one morning after too many nights in sleepless indecision. It would be the first class I would teach since the job offer. The class was on quantitative research methods, a topic I know little about practically or theoretically. I was nervous about how it would go. The day before, I was busying myself trying to understand the meaning of ANOVA tests and the relationship between p values and standard deviation. I felt dislocated, and felt as sorry for my soon-to-be-students as I did for myself. I found myself veering heavily towards accepting the job offer. My interests and enthusiasm are not being made use of here, I concluded, to the detriment of my students, my programme, and my own life as a teacher.
Everything changed within 5 minutes of entering class. I felt a swell of energy rising from within as I submerged in the whirlpool of teacher-student interactions. A cluster of new faces, new people behind them with their unique hidden depths, new relationships between us, and so much growth awaiting! As I started explaining something about statistical significance, I felt a heaviness in my body when a young male student to my left starting slouching absentmindedly in his chair. When asking questions to check the class’ understanding of the concept, I welled with excitement when another student attempted an answer with bright, sparkling eyes. I realised at that moment I would rather be teaching a subject I knew nothing about (and, frankly, had some concerns about) face to face than my favourite subject online. I thrive in this dynamic space, where the currents of feeling circulate. Here is an ecology of emotions, spreading, evolving, co-evolving, eliciting my thoughtful attention and responsive experimentation. It is as alive and real as it is dynamic and complex. It is a space that terrifies me and thrills me, and is one I cannot live without. How might I engage that young man? How will I enthuse others?
I turned down the job. This led to an attempt to articulate semi-conscious aspects of my pedagogy, aspects that are coming into clearer apprehension through this whole experience. It is now becoming clearer to me how much I depend on (and enjoy) empathy as a way of knowing and interacting with students. The term “empathy” is used and thought about in many different ways. Perhaps I should attempt a sketch of what it might mean to me.
I am influenced by those working on the phenomenological descriptions of empathy that acknowledge the primacy of intersubjectivity (e.g. Zahavi; Thompson). When one is empathetic, one is feeling the emotion that is being felt by another. This feeling is not a projection or a theory. We do not form a hypothesis of what the other person is feeling based on an interpretation of their body language and disposition and then feel the consequences of that hypothesis (this is the “theory-theory”). Nor do we simulate the experience after having received our sense impressions of the other. Instead, I assert that the experience of empathy is co-emergent with the perception. It is simultaneous because the perceiving the other’s boredom or sadness or joy is our experience of these similar states emerging within us. I see boredom wash over the student’s body as I feel heaviness wash through my own body. The meaning of the outer experience and the inner experience are given significance by one another. We may be variously conscious of these affective flows, and sometimes not aware of them at all (as when your tired yawn makes me tired and yawn). But they are there. Our bodies gear into a sociality that is fundamental to perception itself, conditioning and enabling the possibilities for thought and action, lending situations a shared tone, a shared ground, a context.
In other words, empathy is part of how we know and interact with people. It is only when we are incapable of empathy that we need to piece together the various bits of information about another person to cobble an hypothesis of what they are experiencing. Void of context, the mind is left to its own scattered devices, analysing a situation with no horizon to give bearings or direction. This happens, and is experienced as a lack of connection, but when it is commonplace it becomes pathological. Thankfully, most of us can get better at empathy through learning. Even if it is such a fundamental pre-cognitive and embodied condition for experience, the capacity of empathy remains open to the world. It provides a context, but is not an impermeable framework. As Evan Thompson puts it, human empathy is open to “pathways to non-egocentric or self-transcendent modes of intersubjectivity” (2001, p. 1). And so we can learn new emotions as we experience new perceptions; the world outside us and the world inside get richer and more nuanced in tandem. The development of our self and our capacity to be affected by those around us are aligned not opposed. This is crucial for pedagogy but also in understanding and participating in the world more generally.
Once I feel empathy, I am now in some sense on a similar path as the other person. I don’t feel “exactly” the same thing that my bored student feels, but this may not matter because they do not feel the same thing from one moment to the next either. The important thing is that an affective feedback loop is occurring, where my empathy is continually calibrating and re-calibrating as I continue to perceive my student. We share a path, perhaps at first a vague synchronisation, but one which is a condition for our respective experiences to hone in on one another with more particularity. With boredom as a shared context, a shift in their chair is felt as an alert break from disengagement and I feel myself suddenly attending to the student’s next move. On the other hand, a continued slouch is also new information because of context; it is felt as a more prolonged boredom. With the passage of time, our immediate perceptions are always put into context. Empathy is the condition for shared experience but is also conditioned by such experiences. The shared path dilates or constricts. Sometimes it brings others into it. Sometimes it dissolves in an instant of total incomprehension.
The meaning of particular statements that students make or do not make is always couched in contexts. The more perceptive I am to these contexts, the more empathic I am to them. The more I feel, the more I see.
Without context, particular statements can be interpreted in many different ways. Our focus shifts from the relationship between the statements and the context to the multitude of semantic possibilities that reside within the utterance. This can mislead us into thinking that it is the nature of language to be infinitely ambiguous and open to interpretation. But textual meanings and their ambiguities result from dissociating statement from context. We hone into nothing but sterilised font, and the contexts at play are only between previous and present words. People who read too many books might be susceptible to forgetting that the meaning of words emerges within and contributes to a more-than-worded world. Those analytic philosophers obsessed with the meaning of words divorced from situation come to mind.
In the case of my job offer, I realised the subtle and dynamic dimensions of the body would disappear: the reams and realms of empathic feedback that accompany the shared words of the classroom. Not only could I not engage in the kind of pedagogy that makes most sense to me as an educator, I would be constantly fighting the quiet but pervasive meta-lesson that we must succumb to, instead of mend, the problem of abstraction. I do not want to contribute to reductionistic assumption that events can be abstracted from their contexts, even if (especially if) I teach that such abstraction is dangerous, leading to instrumental thinking, stereotyping, automaticity, a lack of receptivity, a lack of growth, the logic of standardised solutions, and much of what is contributing to personal, social, ecological destruction widely. (Quite the claim). In other words, I don’t want enact the assumption that form and content do not have to be congruent in pedagogy, itself a miseducative lesson in context.
I do not mean to suggest that there is no place for abstraction. But abstraction is only half of thinking. On its own it can lead to models, theories and hypotheses. It can also lead to concepts and ideas available for analogical transfer into new situations, such as when I parcel out a ‘story’ of my experience and tell it to others with the hope that it resonates for them (it sometimes does!). But the more we apply abstractions, the more we think they work, and the less we are open to remembering that they were in fact abstractions. We must pair our skills in abstraction with skills in contextualising. When and how do the abstractions breakdown? What situations do we invite such that other people and the world might nudge these mental constructions into better coherence, or discount them entirely? For me, it is in face to face situations that my abstractions (such as my cognised hypotheses about what the other person is thinking or feeling) are recontextualised by the ongoing flow of the interaction. Through computer screens, this would forever be an upward swim. Perhaps it would be full of insights about the nature of these problems, maybe even a catalytic opportunity to reconstruct “distance learning.” But this work for another.
The rejoining of abstraction and contextualisation is an important pedagogical project. But it is more than that. The same problems that lurk in our fractured classroom pervade our fractured world, so the rejoinder is an epistemological and ontological project as well.
It is epistemological because it concerns the process and nature of knowing, suggesting that any knowing is incomplete unless it goes back and forth between these two registers. Its ontological significance lies in the fact that this is a necessary way to engage the world. If we pay attention to any phenomenon closely enough, we find it asks us to avoid the extremes of surgical reduction and wooly holism.
Things have parts and these parts interact to form wholes. That is why breaking things down into components and analysing their properties and interactions leads to knowledge. But the wholes also have a sort of “downward causation” because they set the contexts for local interactions in the form of organised relations, boundaries, and relative interconnections and disconnections. There are a lot of wholes and parts in such circular causal organisation in between the smallest and largest phenomena. It is within this meso-world that we live and is here where our actions are meaningful or meaningless, wise or misguided. Empathy is a perceptual response to an ontological whole, the global feeling of another being that pervades and unifies a person’s various behaviours. This whole is not simply created by a set of separate local interactions, as though the eyes, nose, back’s behaviours were all causally effective on their own and the whole body merely an epiphenomenon. No. The whole body sets the conditions for the local parts. People are wholes. And empathy teaches us teaches us there are also wholes in social co-ordination, dynamically whirling between people who co-emerge together like starlings in murmuration or the infectious bellowing of howler monkeys.