ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Chris Hunt

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Curtis | Chuck | Chris
Date: January 2005

Topic: "Should "real world" tragedy be brought into the classroom?"

Tragedy, Ownership, and Empathy in World Events

Curtis Kelly

Tsunami. Death and dislocation. What a difficult topic for our Think Tank. But I have been thinking about this topic a lot, and one recurrent doubt has kept creeping up into my mind: Just because I am so moved by this tragedy, what makes me think my students are too? After all, most of the eighteen year-olds I know act like they would go blind if they read a newspaper, but I was like that too. Granted, a disaster as traumatic as this one, flooding into our television screens every hour is bound to have some impact. As Marc said, of course they feel, “they’re human,” but it might be wrong to assume they feel the way we do for that same reason. They’re human, and the one crucial notion that education has inherited from cognitive psychology is that we can only attend to what is meaningful to us and we can only learn things that we have some kind of personal ownership of.

“We imagine our own families and homes being destroyed and we wonder what we can do to help. This is ownership.”

We older, wiser, and more worldly Think Tankers own this tragedy. All of us are living, or have lived, in an Asian country. All of us have visited at least one of the countries affected, and have friends there. All of us have worked to gain a home and strived to raise a family. So when a woman in a sari comes on television and tells us about how she lost her home and family, we can share her misery. We feel we know that person because she is, in part, each of us. We imagine our own families and homes being destroyed and we wonder what we can do to help. This is ownership.

It is all related to what Senge termed “mental models” twenty years ago. We have these internal constructs and maps that allow us to interpret the events of the tsunami disaster in a personal way. We can use these mental models to imagine what it would be like if it happened to us, and as a result, we experience the wonder of empathy.

But is the same true of an eighteen-year old who has never been out of Sendai? She has never built a home, protected a family, or visited a Thai beach, and she has certainly never bonded with an Indonesian Moslem. Her life is focused on gaining autonomy, finding out who is in her clique, and testing the waters of adulthood. It is wrong to expect her to feel the same way we do about the tsunami disaster. She has a much weaker degree of ownership. To her, the victims of the tsunami might be just as alien as the victims of that even more horrendous disaster in Africa, the one Peter commented, are to us. We have a hard time empathizing with and emoting for the victims of the African disaster ­ compared to say, those of the 9/11 disaster ­ because we cannot take ownership of their situation. We do not have the appropriate mental models. None of us has starved, felt abject poverty, or belonged to a tribe, and that makes it hard for us to make it personal. Well, my creeping doubt has been that the same is probably true for our students in regard to the tsunami disaster.

To test this doubt, I took some time in class today to find out what my students knew about the tsunami disaster. I first asked them information questions to see if they were following the tragedy, and then some questions on their attitudes. The students I asked were eight fourth-year college students, all women, and some of the best I have ever taught. Still, I was surprised that only three of them knew that the most deaths occurred in Indonesia, the others thought Thailand, and that only one could come up with a figure within 50,000 of current death toll estimates. Likewise, only one of the eight had watched at least one television broadcast on the event for 20 minutes or longer. In other words, they were not very informed on the event, which suggested that they were not very interested in it.

Odd, because the latter conclusion was different from what they said. All of them responded they would be “interested” or “very interested” in devoting at least one class to learning about the event. They also had excellent ideas on what we should do in the class. They would like to see news broadcasts from different countries to see how different countries portrayed the event; they would like to know more about problems less directly related to the tsunami, such as post-tsunami crime, health risks, and rebuilding issues; and they would like to discuss what would have happened if the tsunami had hit Japan instead. They even said they would like to do a simulation.

Indeed, even though my little survey confirmed the dark doubt that students are not empathizing to nearly the degree we are, and cannot, it also turned on a light: a light that shines out the solution of how to handle such tragedies in class: Give them the tools to make it their tragedy. Build a bridge over their deficit in mental models that will help them understand, help them empathize, and help them care. As my wonderful students suggested, make them think about what they would do in such a disaster and what they would feel. Do a simulation. Have them write about losing their own homes and families, and then if possible, connect them to someone who did. Help those mental models grow. Watch them take ownership.

In fact, I saw this happen once a long time ago, in the days before e-mail, when I was teaching at Kansai Gaidai. I set up a letter exchange between my first-year college students and English students in a Thai refugee camp. My students wrote nice little letters about themselves and their happy lives. Then, a month later, a packet of replies came, and I will never forget how my students sat right down in the hallway and ripped the packet open to read the letters. Then something happened. They read stories about people who had lost limbs to land mines, lost family members at sea, or were separated forever from their spouses. Their glee changed to grief, but suddenly a whole new world became theirs, because they were actually communicating with someone who invited them into it. They had trouble writing back sometimes, but they were never the same after that, and I am sure that those students, wherever they are now, were hanging on every word of the tsunami reports.

And so the key is to sponsor personal ownership. Then step back and feel the empathy.

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Curtis | Chuck | Chris

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Curtis Kelly, Heian Jogakuin University

Author of Writing from Within

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