March 28 2024

by Cecily Hill, National Humanities Alliance

National Humanities Alliance logo

As of this writing, colleges and universities around the nation have closed their doors; most have shifted to online learning. In-person public programs are on pause, indefinitely. For the majority of us, large components of our work have come to a screeching halt, while we have had to abruptly shift to scores of new personal and professional challenges.

At the National Humanities Alliance, we are continuing our work to document the impact of the humanities in a variety of contexts, but with a particular eye toward how humanities organizations and institutions are serving their communities and constituencies during this challenging time. We are also using this time to support humanities faculty, practitioners, and organizations as they plan for the future.

Jessica L. Tinklenberg, Claremont Colleges

Empathy by John Edward Marin

In 2011, Sara Konrath and her colleagues published a study indicating that college students’ empathy skills seemed to be in steep decline.1 By reviewing the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) scores of college students between 1979 and 2009, researchers concluded that “Empathic Concern was most sharply dropping, followed by Perspective-Taking” and that much of the decline in these two subcategories of dispositional empathy had taken place in the previous decade.2 Konrath et al.’s meta-analysis launched a thousand Higher Ed think pieces and spawned a bevy of initiatives to introduce empathy into the college learning environment.

Christopher J. Richmann, Baylor University

Empathy by John Edward Marin

Empathy: Demanding, Significant, Definable, Measurable

A few semesters ago, I was facilitating a faculty learning group focused on adapting and improving courses for our recently revised common core curriculum. For context and inspiration, we read together the “vision document” that accompanied the recent changes to the core. As an educational developer and a teacher at heart, I couldn’t help but poke my colleagues with the document’s claim that students “will gain a deeper. . .empathy for people from other societies, races, genders, ethnicities, and socio-economic status.” It didn’t take long to get a reaction.

Pages

Subscribe to Religious Studies News RSS