Empathy Builds Foundation for Academic Home

The transition from middle school to ninth grade creates chaos for students. In eighth grade, students know their teachers and their classmates. They have a safe academic home.

Then comes high school.

The building is larger. Their old friends have grown physically and have sometimes outgrown each other socially. There are more teachers and less immediate accountability. Students start to fall through the proverbial cracks.

Their academic homes have been demolished by transition and it takes time to rebuild them.

As a teacher of freshmen sensitive to these affective issues, I began the year with a unit about home. Students would read various accounts of what home means to people and then write an essay of their own. This would fit into our small, differentiated reading group curriculum and create a thematic unit to promote student engagement.

My students hail from Mexico, Honduras, the Philippines and closer to school in Colorado. I wanted to find readings that would reflect their diverse backgrounds. However, knowing the imminent tension between the two majority racial groups--Hispanic and white--I also wanted to introduce the multiculturalism gently. If I hit them over the head with immigration issues, several students would barricade the learning potential.

Lucky for me, PBS had an essay contest on America, My Home [2]. The plethora of essays there worked well for my ninth graders’ broad range of reading lexiles. (There are also audio and video versions available for some of the essays.) Teaching Tolerance offers another great resource in an essay about the indigenous Aleut’s loss of their homes during WWII. U.S. military officials evacuated the people of the Aleutian Islands in an ill-planned relocation to Alaska [3]. While meant to offer safety when the Islands were threatened by enemy attacks, the plan exposed people to a harsh climate, disease and death.

Students were infuriated by the injustices foisted upon the Aleuts’ by the United States government after reading the essay. “I can’t believe they did that.” “How is that legal?” The classroom united around a shared sense of justice. From this emotional openness, we journeyed into more personal territory. Using the PBS site again, we looked at Guiselle’s essay [4] about her mother’s migration from Nicaragua to the United States. Students who had initially made comments like, “We were here first” or “This is our country,” saw the plight of immigrant families. Students who sat silently or jeered back angrily when nativist comments had been verbalized got the chance to share their own families’ immigration stories.

Progressing through model essays in this manner allowed students to develop empathy first and then identify personal connections. They then used these personal connections to write their own essays. Students wrote about the key elements of their home that made them feel safe and loved. They talked about the music they listened to, the family members who cared for them and the locations that had special memories. Across their varied stories, we were pleasantly surprised by many commonalities.

We’d created a home, a safe space to pursue academics. Students voiced their home cultures. We laid the foundation of our classroom culture, defined by openness and compassion.

Eden is a high school language arts teacher in Colorado.