Are you concerned about the growing lack of empathy we are witnessing across multiple levels of our culture, including personal interaction, group communication, and political discourse? Treating others with compassion, particularly children, victims, members of minority groups, and refugees, is a basic human decency. Witnessing our growing, cultural lack of decency is disheartening.
One can assume things are falling apart, and all hope of civility is lost. One can also work to understand that our culture is experiencing a long-overdue period of growth. As more diverse voices play a larger role in our cultural conversation, some become anxious about the changing status quo and resist. The easiest option is to allow such anxiety to drive us to binary views, speak simply from polarized perspectives, and stagnate. The more challenging option is to engage this potential for growth, and work to promote the emergence of a more equitable, democratic society in which diversity and inclusivity are encouraged and able to flourish.
Extending empathy will prove essential to these efforts. To be sure, learning to extend empathy is not easy. The very act of reaching out to another to experience their pain and suffering is stressful and sometimes difficult to manage. Given these challenges, the purpose of this workshop is to provide an overview of The Extending Empathy Project: Goals, Strategies, and Outcomes.
To date, The Extending Empathy Project has sponsored 23 colloquia. The first 10 were in-person presentations that took place at Illinois State University during the 2018-2019 academic year. We then organized five more for 2019-2020, with spring colloquia taking place on Zoom. During 2020-2021, we organized a series of colloquia entitled, The Extending Empathy Project: On the Road to Tulsa. These colloquia were recorded in front of a “live” Zoom audience. Each lasted for 45-60 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A. Videos of all colloquia can be found at the following YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLK-lXqTv3NQDeB1Hi47hmiYCyPWvh7pgX Over the series, participants learned the following: (1) extending empathy into infrastructures and the neuroscience of empathy, (2) the dangers and pitfalls of extending empathy to traumatized persons, (3) empathy and racial identity development, (4) reducing the moral empathy gap in political conversation, (5) why we often find it hard to listen to others, (6) the difficulty of extending empathy to those we would rather avoid, and (7) the first-person experience of extending as well as being denied, empathy. The final, culminating colloquium took place as commemoration of the centennial anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.
During On the Road to Tulsa, 10 faculty and students attended each colloquium and completed a questionnaire regarding what they had learned from the colloquia, and how they planned to apply it in their teaching and daily life.