Empthy: a Global Education Conference session proposal

I plan to participate in the 4th annual Global Education Conference to be held November 18th to the 22nd. And I encourage you to do so as well. The event is described as:

...a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for building education-related connections around the globe while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity. Last year’s conference featured 400 general sessions and 20 keynote addresses from all over the world with over 13,000 participant logins.

In my work with international schools, I've come to realize we all have more challenges in common than challenges that are unique to us.  Among those challenges is identifying with any degree of certainty what skills and dispositions our students must develop and master for career and personal fulfillment.

Skills - in math, in reading, in writing - and basic content area facts - in history, in literature, in science, in government - get a lot of attention. These "hard" skills have been taught for a long time and are fairly easy to measure on objective tests. Happily problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and information-fluency are increasingly mentioned as well.

But I would argue that without attention to soft skills, whether we call them dispositions or habits of mind or right brain skills - the hard skills aren't much good except in helping one pass a test. And the "soft skill" that I've been think a lot about lately is empathy - the ability to see a situation from another person's point of view. In engaging with a global community, the difficulty level of being empathetic correlates directly to the degree of difference between oneself and another person culturally and geographically. (In other words, the more different we are, the tougher it is to get into each other's heads.)

Empathy is too often thought of as a feel-good, let's all join hands and sing, multicultural tolerance, respect and appreciation, and even, perhaps, a subtle form of cultural snobbery. But anyone who looks down on empathy as a means of simply being a  nicer person is sadly mistaken. 

The ability to genuinely understand what others need, value, respect, and fear is critical to business, political, and personal success.

I am giving myself until November 18th to learn enough about it so I can leave anyone attending my session "confused at a higher level."

Your Name and Title: Doug Johnson, Director of Media and Technology
School or Organization Name: Mankato Area Public Schools
Co-Presenter Name(s):
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): All
Short Session Description (one line): I will discuss concrete ways of helping students look at situations through the eyes of those who are different from them, building the critical skill of empathy for global relations and success in today's world.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like): Walking a Mile in Another's Moccasins: Purposefully Developing Empathy. This session will define empathy and describe how it is critical to building successful relationships - business, political, and personal - in a global community. Several concrete suggestions with examples for building empathic abilities in students (and in ourselves) will be discussed.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: https://dougjohnson.wikispaces.com/Empathy

BFTP: Is everything making me stoopid(er)?

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post, July 30, 2008.

Some days it takes all the courage one can muster just to drive into crime-ridden Mankato, MN: 

From this morning's paper:

Mooning suspect remains at large

A pepper-spray-wielding woman who sprayed a bar bouncer after mooning police officers early Tuesday remains at large. 

Police were called to Choppers on South Front Street about 1 a.m. to report that a woman was causing problems in the bar.

The woman reportedly stepped outside the bar, dropped her pants, and displayed her buttocks to officers passing by in a squad car. The officers apparently didn’t notice. When the bouncer chastised the woman for her behavior and attempted to remove her from the premises, she took a pepper spray container from her purse and sprayed the bouncer’s face and the bar area. Then she took off running. 

The only description given of the woman is that she is heavyset.

"Heavyset?" That doesn't exactly narrow down the set of suspects around here. 

Has anyone else noticed that newspapers are getting thinner - in width, in length, and especially in depth? News magazines like Time and Newsweek (print is now gone, gone, gone) are getting thinner on editorial content. NPR and CNN are now catering to our sub-five minute attention spans. Most movies seem to run about 90 minutes instead of two hours and critics complain when they run "long" - and any scene that runs more than ten seconds slows the pace. I am not holding my breath hoping for a political debate where participants could actually treat issues in depth.

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic asks "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Motoko Rich asks in the NYT's article "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading," if reading on the Internet is the cause of poor reading test scores.  I've worried about my change in reading habits for some time.

If the snippitization of information was made popular by Internet sites, it has certainly gotten a good deal of help from the regular media. 

OK, here it comes. You KNOW I couldn't resist...

In response to last week's post "Are We Teaching Kids to Hate Reading", I received this comment via Google+:

Everything currently written is garbage. ... But I believe that what [kids] are reading, blogs, twitter, poorly done no?  They are used to garbage.  Hand them Melville and they won't read it.  Plus, I think rap music has much to do with their taste in words."

Those words made me wonder if posts deploring the changes in communication, loss of taste, and/or decline in quality of media aren't just a symptom of a younger generation's tastes superseding an older generation's.

My parents thought I read crap (comic books, Mad magazine, Tarzan, Heinlein, etc. - what my professor G. Robert Carlson at the U of Iowa charitably called "sub-literature."  Rock and roll was as obnoxious to them as rap is to me today.  I would say we ought to be careful in damning formats rather than content. I've read some nice stuff in blogs and crap in books and magazines. Twitter, chat, text messaging I don't think were ever intended as art forms ;-)  

Future of Education session this Tuesday!

I am looking forward to visiting with Steve Hargadon who runs the Future of Education interviews. Steve and I will be talking about some of the ideas in my book The Indispensable Librarian at 7PM (CDT) this Tuesday, September 10th.

I'm a long time admirer of the work Steve has done in helping all educators build and strengthen personal learning networks as well as the great job he does in organizing the the "unconference" held the Saturday before each ISTE conference.

If you have a few mintues, drop by!