'Beautifully gratifying or predominantly painful'? Autoethnographic inquiries into teaching empathy in a secondary school English classroom.

摘要

This dissertation explores through autobiography and ethnography the concept of empathy. Relying upon reflexivity as a methodology, the researcher examined her own biases, assumptions, and experiences with the teaching of "difficult knowledge" specifically through lens of first person Holocaust narratives.;The researcher investigated various and contested philosophical and theoretical positions and problematics regarding the concept of empathy. Via self-reflexive forms of autobiographical inquiry, she interrogated both her changing perceptions and expectations as well as her interpretations of interviews with former students. Participants were selected from a 2010 pilot study, in which the researcher conducted an autoethnographic investigation concerning a curricular unit on the Holocaust, forgiveness and Simon Weisenthal's The Sunflower with her Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class of high school seniors in New York City.;Arguing that empathy is increasingly relevant and critical, given current world situations, the author grapples with presumptions inherent to empathy's dominant definition-- that emotions are fully coherent. She does so via post-structurally inflected theories about knowledge and subjectivities as ever changing and shifting, unstable, and never fully knowable.