Course development grant leads to exploration of empathy
Dr. Jesse Cheng, assistant professor of Social and Cultural Sciences, became the first recipient of a Peace Studies course development grant from the Center for Peacemaking in summer 2017. His proposal outlined his desire to introduce students to narrative-based approaches to legal defense work — how empathy provides a unique lens through which to look at crime and justice.
In Spring 2018, the first 25 students registered for “Empathy, Crime and Justice.” Now nearly 100 students have taken the course.
Dr. Cheng’s training as a cultural anthropologist and lawyer prepared him for the unique demands of his pre-teaching career as a mitigation specialist. A little-known profession, mitigation specialists serve as members of a legal defense team and are tasked with researching a defendant’s history — (often including mental illness, abuse, and other private details) — to aid them in court. An important skill working as a mitigation specialist is being able to connect with people. For Cheng, empathy was a daily enterprise.
Now he’s teaching Marquette students about empathy.
One of the first lessons in the class focuses on the correlation between peacemaking and empathy. A big part of resolving conflict is seeing things from another person’s eyes. “Empathy is so critical to learning more about the people around you.” Cheng said. Empathy is pivotal to human interactions.
Students grow in class by learning strategies to practice empathy in their lives. Cheng uses hand-on exercises to give his students experience acting with empathy in different scenarios.
One exercise is having his students write a reflection about a conflict in their life. One of the prompts is for students to think about ways they could have been more empathetic in this situation.
Another exercise Cheng uses is sharing his own life experiences with his students, and having them analyze where he can use more empathy in the situation.
Cheng sees empathy not just as a relational skill, but as a way of coming to terms with the hard truth. “I see empathy as a mode of empirical fact finding,” Cheng said. “When you really delve into someone’s subjective world, like the way they see things from their point of view, I believe that you learn something new about the world.”
This course has left a lasting impression on students by providing lessons and skills to carry beyond the classroom. “I hope that they look at empathy as something that they can continue to have a relationship with for the rest of their lives,” Cheng said.
His goal is for all of his students to be equipped to practice empathy and demonstrate how it can transform traditional analytic approaches in any field to discover more empathic, narrative-driven practices.
“I think anybody will be helped by very consciously thinking about empathy as something that they can continue to develop,” Cheng said.
