Empathy & Education: Urban Ed with a [R]evolutionary Bent

*This post is in collaboration with two young people (H and C) from my transfer school, ages 21 and 18. One is an alumni and one is a current student. They wanted to contribute after talking about the subject and the current student received extra credit in a summer school class for his contributions.*

There is an anonymous quote that’s been going around the internet for years, and it’s sometimes how I start classes as we start to build our community. When I started talking to my kids about what they wished they could tell educators, what they felt people needed to understand about them and transfer school students in general, they reminded me of it as a place to start. H and C, in particular, sat and spent time with me analyzing this piece of text, and what it meant to them, and what it reflected about their experiences in school. 

“Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like a person’ and sometimes they use ‘respect’ to mean ‘treating someone like an authority’ and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say ‘if you won't respect me I won't respect you’ and it sounds fair, but what they mean is ‘if you won't treat me like an authority, I won't treat you like a person’.”

So, like the brilliant students that they are, H and C knew that in order to analyze what this text meant, they’d have to break it down and define respect first, get us all on the same page. They immediately began to equate respect to social capital - something you can trade on. Kids, maybe especially urban kids, know this instinctively - as every “street” trope in media exemplifies. C explained “respect is something you can have even if you got nothing else, and it gets you stuff, like through doors, and safety, and even things sometimes”. H picked up explaining that respect is kind of like power, and becomes more important the less material resources and actual power people have, as their sole protective factor and asset to their name. 

So then we had to consider how people get respect - I asked them the age old debate question - should respect be immediately given and then is people’s to lose, or should we take the more cautious approach and wait for respect to be earned? H and C both first jumped to respect needing to be earned. This feels justified if we’re thinking of respect as a type of currency. I’ve always tended to lean the other way though - that we end up with better overall interactions if we give respect freely, so I pushed them a little. H, who is wise beyond her years and should probably teach my classes for me, paused a minute and then told me she thought I was using a different definition of respect than the one we’d just talked about. She said, correctly, that what I was talking about was kindness. Respect, she continued, implies a level of trust and knowness - that’s why it works as collateral. She’s right of course, certainly right in the way urban teens define and experience respect, and this makes it a precious commodity, not something that can be demanded, even without the sneaky power differential the quote exposes. 

This type of cultural reciprocity (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Lim & Renshaw, 2001) where teachers and students can work together as equals on large scale ideas is invaluable for many reasons, including because of how it allows us to define our terms together - something we always harp on students to do but may forget to do ourselves. Taylor (2017) expands on Mezirow (1981) explaining the way our frame of reference defines our experiences and influences our behavior. If my frame of reference has me equating kindness with respect, it makes perfect sense to walk into a classroom and list it as one of the things we should all show each other at all times. If my students do not share my frame of reference, instead perhaps hold the same definition as H and C (likely), then I’ve just asked them for something appalling - for their blind trust and personal assets, with no proof I’m good for any of it. In this way, even unintentionally, the cruel power dynamic of the original quote can start to be manufactured. You can picture it playing out - a student protests, the teacher starts to form an opinion about a student who disagrees with offering kindness (if that’s her frame of reference), and suddenly every movement by this apparently purposefully unkind student is suspect… Stitt (2021) shows the level of extra harm that befalls students when they are put under extra surveillance due to being viewed through a negative lens. 

This is all before we even start to look at power dynamics. H and C said the original quote immediately made them think about the police - how when they get stopped cops say things like this, but in reality they are expected to be wholly submissive just to “earn” not coming to bodily harm. This we see regularly, and deserves separate attention. But for the sake of this blog, I asked them if they felt it related to any of their experiences at school at all. Both immediately jumped in that it did. C exclaimed, “H— yes! At my old school, before they expelled me, they used to act like we was animals. Just like the cops. Everything we did they thought was us being bad and mean and dangerous. They said we had to respect them cause they was the adults, and what they meant was we had to do exactly what they said or they’d kick us out and lock us up. It was like they was afraid of us,”. H jumped in and explained she too had often felt like the adults were afraid of her, some even said it - that she was dangerous and had no business being in a regular school. This, she said quietly, hurt her feelings and made her want to give up. She continued that she felt the adults at the two previous high schools she had attended considered anything remotely disobedient as disrespectful - so every offense always ended up counting like two. Any display of individuality or questioning of authority seemed to render the offender sub-human. She recounted being told she’d never amount to anything, that she was dangerous and even her previous first alternative school didn’t want to deal with her anymore. 

 Fuhr (2017) describes the idea of bildung as a core lynchpin of learning – a learner’s quest to know themself and better themself and the world around them. Immodrino-Yang (2016) explains, “it is literally neurobiologically impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotions,” (p. 18). In short - we need to be whole selves with feelings in order to learn. And yet we set up education in a way that straight asks students to give up their selves and blindly obey. In this way, not only do we set up the cruel power dynamic of the quote, but we negate it: only by giving up personhood: autonomy and agency, will you count as treating the adult as an authority, and so then they don’t even have to do the bare minimum of treating you like a person. 

One thing H and C both brought up was how hated they felt by the adults at their previous schools, and how it added to their stress levels and made them afraid to ask for help and want to give up. H brought the conversation back to this by explaining, “like when you were thinking of respect like kindness, Miss, that I do think we should always give people unless they prove otherwise. But like it’s hard to give anything, even kindness, when you can’t even move or speak without them thinking it’s you wildin’.” Her posture slumped back and she shrugged. She makes a fair point - in a hierarchical system, everything comes from the top down, which means only what is valued by the top will be present – if kindness, much less respect, are not what comes from the top it will be physically impossible for those at the bottom to show it. It will be blamed on them not having the desire (which to be fair, it’s hard to want to be kind to people who are mean to you), but as H explained, it will actually be because they won’t be trusted enough to be given the space to offer anything, kindness included. Banks et al. (2001) explains that a school’s structure has to have a more level playing field to create a culture of care and collaboration and explains that top-down administration rarely if ever creates equity and transformational education. 

H and C both jumped on this, explaining that kids grow up monitoring adults around them to see how to behave, not just in terms of learned behavior, but in terms of what is valued, what gets them the best treatment, etc. We know this to be true from Bowlby’s discussion of the attachment styles (1969, 1982) and Winnicott’s (1960) true self vs. false self theory, and Kohut’s (1989) discussion of empathic attunement - children are constantly reading their parents and tuning their behavior. Winnicott discusses this further in his discussion of the formation of false selves - that children will do what it takes to have a connection (even negative) with their parent, and so will throw tantrums, or perhaps become a model silent child, whatever gets a reluctant parent to interact with them in some way. Beyond that, not only is this attunement to adults how kids figure out to behave, but it’s how they get their senses of self. Self-concept is developed primarily through interactions with other people - initially parents and then others as our circles expand (Dermitzaki & Efklides, 2000). Since children spend so much time at school, much of their self-concept is created by the way they perceive their teachers’ beliefs about them throughout their schooling (Brown & Bigler, 2005; Cornelius-White, 2007; Cushman & Cowan, 2010; Fall & Roberts, 2012; Lane et al., 2004; Rubie-Davies et al., 2006; Szumski & Karwowski, 2019). Children who are punished for any action - even picking up a pencil that falls without asking (an anecdote C told from his time at a no excuses charter school), become frozen. Kindness and respect, and especially learning, are all active processes that require action. 

All this just to support what Banks et al. (2001) describe - schools administered from the top-down in a strict hierarchy will not create collective and participatory systems, in large part because the level of control exerted to keep the hierarchy in place crushes students’ self-concepts. Students’ self-concepts—particularly their senses of self-worth—have been shown to play a big role not just in academic achievement, but in overall decision making and life direction (Cushman & Cowan, 2010; Fall & Roberts, 2012; Lane et al., 2004; Rubie-Davies et al., 2006; Szumski & Karwowski, 2019). We talk a lot about grit, resilience, and student responsibility and motivation (generally with the connotation of them lacking these things), but not nearly enough about the ways we systematically go about breaking students. This breaking is exponentially increased for students of color, whom society sees as dangerous and in need of being controlled (Giroux, 2010; Goff et al., 2014; Kennedy et al., 2017; Males, 1996; Mitra, 2008; Takanishi, 1993 Wilson et al., 2017). As Banks et al. (2001) state, schools reflect and perpetuate society’s “underlying values” (p. 202), and so students of color are at terrible risk, not just academically but of coming to extreme harm emotionally and physically via the school to prison pipeline. My school is a “last stop” along that highway, and we see the cruelty that befalls kids and the harm it causes daily. The amount of terror and self-hatred induced in these kids that society is terrified of and hates, is staggering.

By this point H and C seemed a little dejected - somewhere between furious and resigned, and their faces showed real sadness. I asked them if it’s hopeless, and to their immense credit, they jumped back to life. “Of course not!” They exclaim! And of course it’s not, because here are two of “these kids” - one with a criminal record, both having been expelled several times and labeled violent degenerates, brilliantly, enthusiastically, analytically, supportively, and kindly helping me with a doctoral program assignment. Here they are, engaging with ideas, theories, and studies. Here they are engaging with me - one more on the long list of “little white lady” teachers they’ve had - a list which by this point should have conditioned them to fear and hate the lot of us, just as they are clumped, feared, and hated. And why? Not for credit - C is getting extra credit but doesn’t need it - he already has an A and is half done with his final paper. H is an alumni and just stopped by to chat after her overnight shift when I told her the convo I was going to have with the class. They are doing this because they care deeply about the world around them, their fellow students, the systems and dynamics and disasters of society. And beyond that, to their immeasurable credit (although not remotely unusual in my students), they care deeply about anyone who is remotely kind to them, who lets them be and think and supports them, who in their words, “likes” them. (And I do like them, very much. Not just because they are my babies, but because I value and admire their thinking, their analysis, their empathy and compassion, their work ethic, their humor… These are people I’d choose on a team to do anything…)

This “liking” becomes the thing they run with, now several hours into conversation. “Miss, you know we’d do anything for you”. And I do, and am immeasurably grateful. (This is a credit to their characters, not anything I’ve done to earn it). In fact, they’d do anything for any adult who has “liked” them along the way - much the way kids do anything for a parent who has shown the least bit of care. Much the way Maté (1999, 2003, 2020) explains that attachment is the number one motivating force in the world for all humans. Much the way Immodrino-Yang (2016) explains the necessity of emotion (and therefore connection) for complex thought and learning. To like a kid offers them safety - when you like someone they can screw up and will get another chance. It means there’s something inherent about them that maintains worth, no matter what else happens. This is critical, especially for kids who haven’t had enough evidence of that blind inherent worth. 

In discussion both H and C, who are always doing a hundred times more to bolster my confidence and feelings of self-worth than I’ve ever done for them, sweetly tell me how I was the first to tell them they are smart, which is outrageous since it is indisputable. It makes me think about current pedagogical insights, and how right now it’s considered incorrect to praise kids’ innate intelligence - they think it will harm intrinsic motivation and create a fixed mindset – which makes sense to a degree - and certainly praising hard work goes a long way too. However, I think in urban ed, especially by high school, it is worth remembering how crushed and torn many of our kids' self-concepts have been, and it may be worth offering positive pieces of self-definition. They know hard work, cyclical poverty breeds generations of hard work that gets nowhere. They are well aware they can (and will have to) work hard. What they are often less aware of is that they deserve a positive result from it. A fixed mindset isn’t a good thing, but a fixed sense of self and self-worth that can’t be changed by the negative opinions and treatment of others is an invaluable thing to go through life with. It’s why Erikson (1963, 1968) put so much emphasis on the importance of the early stages of psychosocial development. 

In a world that wants to crush our kids, we owe them help building an impenetrable safe around their sense of self-worth. What so many people read as entitlement in kids is so often a sense of nothing to lose, which is pretty common when you have nothing… Additionally, Becker’s (1973) Labeling Theory explains that labels become self-fulfilling prophecies, and when we make kids feel they are worthless and can never do anything right, they don’t feel capable of working hard towards betterment - so they may as well, and in fact it necessitates them circumventing the usual systems and potentially behaving in ways we frown upon. I think it is worth telling kids they are smart. Tell them they are good. Tell them you like them. None of it has to be testabley proven; all of it is true enough in the way that all individuals have an intelligence about them, a goodness about them, and inherent worth. When you tell them this is who they are, who you see them as, it makes them safe in your presence - because we protect who we value, and as Maslow (1943) makes clear, it is only when we are safe that we can do anything else.

H and C offer some advice and explanation to teachers, which seems like it should be obvious, but based on their experiences and the experiences of most of my students, it clearly is not. “Try to like us,” they say. “Try to like us, and I promise we’ll step up to make it easier”. They remind us we have the power, so whether a classroom is frightening or warm and comfortable, whether there is space to earn and offer respect, whether there is safety to pursue ideas and growth, is really up to us - but they’ll help us build it given half the chance. They just have to be allowed, because they are in too precarious a position and have too much to lose to try to force the issue, and as Banks et al. (2001) said, there cannot be collaboration with such an imbalance of power. We owe it to our kids to like them - to believe in their inherent worth, and try to make light of and laugh off their childish screw-ups. We owe it to them because that is what gives them enough safety to make mistakes, and mistakes are how we all learn. 

I have to confess, I looked up how to start and introduce a blog. Anecdotes were suggested. I have a hard time thinking through the wealth of anecdotes I have to share juxtaposed with my distaste for offering stories to “humanize” my very clearly human and wonderful kids for anyone… However, because I think sometimes stories humanize all of us and get us on the same page, I’ll start with a quick one from my 4th year teaching, my first year at a transfer (last chance) school. It was mid fall and I was nearly but not quite 25 years old. My oldest students were 22, and we were over by Broadway Junction, kind of on the border of East New York and Brownsville in Brooklyn. I’d been teaching 7th and 8th grade in the neighborhood the last three years, and seeing what became of my students is what pushed me to get a job at a transfer high school.

That morning it was a couple minutes into second period, and a kid I think I had met maybe once or twice before came in. He hadn’t been in class enough to have a binder, so I handed him an empty one along with some looseleaf and a label, instructed him to grab a seat, put it together, and try the “Do Now” on the board. He put together the binder, then asked to go to the bathroom, and I reminded him the school had a “no bathrooms for the first 20 minutes” rule. He pushed back, saying he really had to go. I told him if it was that bad he should have gone before class, since he was late anyway, and he’d have to wait. He persisted, and I told him he’d get in trouble in the hall. He paused a second, but said he didn't care, he was going to take the pass and go. Thinking maybe he was stressed by and avoiding the Do Now since he hadn’t been in class, I offered to go over it with him. “Why you dragging it?” He asked me, and on a whim I went with the truth – I’d get in trouble if he went then. He looked at me, and his whole body and demeanor softened. He sat down, picked up his pencil, and asked me a couple questions about the Do Now, which he caught on to quickly. However, another couple minutes later he was out of his seat again and said was going to go without the pass, then they’d know he just “busted out” and wouldn’t blame me. I reminded him that then he’d get in extra trouble - the dean monitors the halls and bathrooms. “What’ll you tell him?” I ask the student. The student proceeded to pull down the side of his already heavily sagged jeans to where I could see a gauze wrapped thigh with blood seeping through below his boxer shorts, “I’mma tell him about this bullet in my leg”, he answered. Wide-eyed I sputtered something along the lines of “oh my god, go, definitely go, go to the nurse” and opened the door for him. 

So why this anecdote to lead into a post about the unfair ways we view, judge, and treat urban students when I have tons of warmer and fuzzier ones about kids I have deep relationships with, who are deeply committed to academics, who I feel I was really useful to in some way? Obviously one reason is that any story with bullets gets people’s attention, and we can talk about the nonchalance with which he treated this injury and we can think about how commonplace violence is. But while trauma-porn can serve a purpose at getting attention, that’s not the focus. Instead I want to focus on what the student seems to focus on. The things that most struck me were the empathy and generosity of this student. In a society which tends to view and treat my kids like hardened criminals - “superpredators” if you will, I ask you to picture the softness of the kid, who though literally bleeding, sucked it up to try not to get his teacher, who he barely knew, in trouble; who came to school despite it all and tried an assignment he had no context for, simply to cooperate. And so here are a few things I think are worth analyzing in this interaction:

He did not lead with his injury

He came to school, an infrequent occurrence, with the injury

He tried not to get me in trouble

He tried the work

So what to make of this. For starters, not leading with his injury is an odd choice – if I was bleeding, especially from something like a gunshot wound, I’d probably use that to get whatever I wanted, certainly a break from class. So why wouldn’t he? I never got to ask him, but it seems like it might speak to his sense of self-worth, and how he feels viewed at school. Maybe he didn’t feel it would be seen as that important, or maybe he just wasn’t comfortable sharing that much of himself immediately. Maybe he thought it would cause him to be viewed as a “certain type” of kid, in a way he didn’t want. I hope he didn’t assume no one would care, though after some stories students have told me about not being allowed to go to the nurse for various injuries throughout their schooling, it seems possible. 

Secondly, even with these potential misgivings about sharing his injury, he came to school. But why? I have a million heartwarming anecdotes about kids who persevered through tremendous hardship, including similar injuries, to pursue their education because it mattered deeply to them. But this wasn’t one of those kids. Not that it couldn’t be, not that he wasn’t smart or a strong writer (he was a gifted lyricist), but he wasn’t committed to school at that point in his life, he rarely came, so why that day? Nicholas A. Ferroni famously says, “students who are loved at home, come to school to learn, and students who aren’t, come to school to be loved.” (Miller et al., 2020). Love, connection, safety, community are prerequisites. Bowlby (1969) and Winnicott (1960) explain that in order for children to psychologically exist in the world, they must feel worthy - meaning deserving of a decent life, and capable - meaning able to take action towards that plausible existence. Maté (1999, 2003, 2020) repeatedly explains that when push comes to shove attachment will beat out all other driving forces. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) tells us that safety is paramount - the controlling factor in allowing our innate stress response to yield to higher order thinking. Safety exists where there is connection and love, and for some kids school may be their best shot at these things. This can also make school a place of conflict - somewhere they go in hopes of being able to exhale, but if they spend most of their lives in fight or flight mode, the very act of trying to let that guard down can feel threatening.

The third thing that really struck me, was how he tried not to get me in trouble, even though this wasn’t one of the kids I’m particularly close with. That’s what got him to sit down - not the threats of the rules being enforced, not anything about the work, but a human desire not to cause trouble for someone he’d deemed on his side. It doesn’t take much… In fact I’d say I handled that situation fairly poorly - just lamely continued to reiterate school rules to a kid almost my own age who rarely attended anyway. I did none of the things any style of classroom management would dictate: I displayed no authority - citing the dean as who would get him in trouble, I gave no reasonable explanation even though theoretically the rule stemmed from it being harder to catch up if you miss the beginning of class, and I didn’t do much to check in on his personal needs. However, to him, apparently not immediately going off on him as if he was just trying to be defiant, and displaying the small bit of vulnerability in admitting I didn’t want to get in trouble, humanized me enough to be someone he wished to protect. Why do we set the bar so much higher for seeing urban children as human?

Fourth, he even tried the work. I have plenty of anecdotes about kids striving for academic success for a brighter future, kids trying to prove their intelligence and worth through academics to some adult who told them they’d never amount to anything, kids finding interest, connection, and purpose in texts and ideas and language. However, considering the sporadic nature of this student’s attendance and his lack of attention to the assignment prior to me wanting to help him with it, I think in this case it may be further evidence towards his desire for connection, rather than academic gains. He tried it, not because I somehow performed teacher magic and made it interesting, important, or useful to him, but because it came wrapped in (albeit minimal) kindness. This student did the work to reach out and form a connection. When I offered gentle personal attention towards the work, the work became worth doing, because that attention was worth having and the connection became worth making. Beyond that, it made him part of the class - everyone else was working on the same short assignment. Feelings of belonging have long been shown to positively affect self-concept and achievement behaviors, and are a key factor in school success (Curtin et al., 2013; Inzlicht & Good, 2005; Waller, 2020). 

We often fault students for lacking intrinsic motivation - we tell them we can’t want it more than them or for them, that they have to see the purpose in and desire that academic success. But we ignore that for many students they have no basis for that positive view of education, and that our system doesn’t actually promise much based on academic success unless it is extreme enough to transcend our usual barriers of socioeconomic class and race (the student who ranks 10th or 15th in his class at a bottom tier NYC high school doesn’t get much in the way of scholarships or accolades, no matter how hard he worked for it…). It is a privilege to get to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake, or while being average. We also often ignore the isolation striving for academic excellence can come with - if it is uncool amongst their peers, if they are the first or only ones in their family to make that choice. I’ve seen parents angry about what feels like their kids looking down on and moving beyond them say things along the lines of “go ahead and go to college, but don’t bother coming home”. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943) makes clear we’ll sacrifice esteem - achievement to maintain our sense of love, belonging, and community. Maté (1999, 2003, 2020) reiterates that attachment beats out everything else every time.