Examining Empathy
When a contributor to the Miller-McCune magazine needed an expert, he knew who to call: Suzanne Keen, the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Washington and Lee University.
Suzanne is quoted at length in an article titled “Teaching Empathy to the ‘Me’ Generation,” by Eric Leake, a Ph.D. candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Louisville. Suzanne, of course, is well known for her scholarship on empathy. Her 2007 book, Empathy and the Novel, examines the topic in depth.
The article discusses the so-called Empathy Experiment at Capital University, in Columbus, Ohio. Suzanne tells Leake, “I think when teachers in real life are interacting with students — all real people — the empathy-and-moral-education relation can be much more robust if the teachers can make a direct correlation.”
You can read the entire article here. And you can read more about Suzanne and her scholarship here, in this article about her 2008 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.
Miller-McCune is available in print and online. It bills itself as containing “polished, in-depth reports on research and solutions across the policy spectrum — from health care, education and energy to international affairs, poverty and the global economy.”
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