May 4th, 2022—What does it mean for a teacher to express empathy? What does it mean for a teacher to be compassionate? Is there a difference between the two terms that is worth attending to in the daily practice of teaching? I have been thinking about these questions because in a recent class activity, led by a student, I had to discern which term is of greatest importance to the way I teach. The activity was to circle ten words from a list of qualities that describe your ideal self. And then winnow the list down to five words. I was stuck. I was holding fast to six words, two of which were empathy and compassion. The other four words rang true and I didn’t want to cut any on them. I had to choose. I chose compassion as my fifth word. I could have bent the rules and retained six words, but the activity helped me focus on the values of highest priority. Reducing to five was a worthwhile task.
In my post activity reflection and reading, the difference between empathy and compassion is primarily a difference in types of relationships. Both are necessary and important but compassion feels, to me, like a natural extension of empathy. Empathy, by its very nature, retains a sort of distancing between the educator and the student. “I feel for you but I’m not you”. Empathy advances student/teacher relationships because it recognizes an emotional bond as important to effective teaching. It opens the teacher to experience the student beyond more narrowly defined descriptors like assessments, performance indicators, or rubrics.
Empathy begins the process of humanizing the learner by inviting the teacher to imagine what it would be like to stand in the place of the student and experience life. Yet, empathy doesn’t include the need for action, beyond a willingness of acknowledgment that a student’s emotions are real and can influence academic outcomes.
I experience compassion as less distancing and more intimate. It posits the value of going beyond imagination to being present to the learner and sharing in the pain they are experiencing. The act of compassion diminishes the teacher as the center of knowing and moves them to a place that is at the level of the student. The power and personhood differential is narrowed and even collapsed. It is deeply humanizing. Compassion includes and eclipses empathy, “I feel for you, I share your pain, we are together in resolving our shared suffering”.
Compassion requires attunement, moving into harmony with the learner and their struggles. Attunement is premised on an instructional act of deep listening, seeing beyond the external to the ineffable qualities of humanness. Through the experience of shared suffering the teacher and learner move closer to co-equal status. The teacher both sees and feels the student’s discomfort. Once harmonized, the teacher and student can co-create a new way of being and doing. Compassion is ultimately relational in its experience and resolution.
An often-reported danger of compassion for teachers is, compassion fatigue. A state of being when a teacher is emotionally overwhelmed by the complexity and severity of student suffering. Teachers often feel that they are forced to make choices regarding which students to help or how to distribute their limited time in support of all students. In such circumstances, the teacher’s giving and caring heart simply runs out of energy. Because the needs are often too big for any one teacher, even as they try over and over again, they feel a sense of betrayal to their vocation to serve students. When their call to teach, serve and care feels inadequate for the task, a deep and abiding sense of imposter syndrome develops.
From my personal experience, a stumbling block in compassion that can lead to fatigue is the question of ownership and agency. When I enter into a state of compassion with a student, I have to be careful to not link my success and sense of self to the student’s ability to grow. A hallmark of compassion is entering into the shared experience of pain and suffering. But compassion fatigue begins when I make the resolution of the student’s pain a marker of my personal identity and success as an educator. This transfer of ownership, both reduces the student’s sense of agency and capacity to act in their best interest. And it can lead to a condition where my emotional gas tank runs empty.
Every student is a unique creation with a unique journey toward emotional, intellectual and spiritual wholeness. The path is their trail to follow. I can and should support, but not direct the placement of their feet. I too have my unique journey as an educator and person. Together we can describe the path we are on, share in the journey, and still make decisions on how to walk based on our gifts and lived wisdom. Fatigue sets in when results are tied to the shared experience. Have you ever tried walking in the exact footsteps of another person? I find it tiring and nearly impossible to continue for an extended period of time.
In the Western intellectual tradition a problem is defined, analyzed and resolved. Compassion, it seems, operates under a different logic. A problem is felt, entered into, in shared experience, and the resolution is co-facilitated while retaining autonomy. Most importantly, compassion doesn’t affix a timeline and strategic plan. Certainly, the goal is to reduce or eliminate the source of suffering and pain. Yet, in my experience, there is also a sense that how and when that resolution will occur is indeterminate. This is because in many cases the sources of pain are bigger and more complex than the individual actions of teachers.
Compassion, for me, points to an organic and generative logic beyond the rational ideology of efficiency and grades. It lands in the realm of the spiritual elements of education, where student and educator are in relationship to something greater than self. Compassion allows the educator and student to live into the paradox of individual and community of caring.