Introduction and Rationale
It was the end of math center time and the classroom was buzzing with noise and activity as each group began to clean up their station. Amongst the normal level of chatter came a determined exclamation – "I'm telling!" As most primary teachers would do, I shuddered at these familiar words. Here comes more unnecessary drama. Ella stomped over to me yelling, "Ms. Kiesler! Lucas is being mean to me!" "Can you be more specific?" I replied. "He hit me and knocked down my tower," Ella said as she scowled in Lucas' direction. "Lucas, please come here," I called and patiently waited for the culprit to mosey on over. "Lucas, why did you hit Ella?" Lucas looked up at me and adamantly swore, "I didn't mean to. It was an accident." "Well, did you stop to see if Ella was okay?" I ask, knowing full well that the answer would be a no uttered with a blank stare. (This exchange happens so many times a week, every week – all year long. I start to feel like a parakeet squawking to myself.)
Both parties in the above scenario are guilty of egocentric thinking. This whole episode occurred because neither child was able to stop and consider the other person's point of view. Lucas was so busy bounding through the classroom that he bumped into Ella and didn't think twice about stopping to see if she was okay. Her feelings didn't even cross his mind. Likewise, Ella was so offended by Lucas' behavior that she immediately called for my help instead of taking a moment to consider the intentions behind Lucas' actions. Perhaps he had intended to hurt her, or perhaps it was an accident. Ella assumed he had done it on purpose with no thought to the greater context in which the offense occurred. So wrapped up in their own experiences, Ella and Lucas failed to consider the other person's perspective. What's more, they took time from the proceedings of the class as I, the teacher, had to stop everything and help them resolve this conflict.
While such a dispute may seem minor to adults, it is a critical event in the lives of these young students who are ever present in the moment. As any primary grade teacher will tell you, our task is to squeeze content into the limited time in the school day when we aren't addressing the social development of our young students. It is often forgotten that the social-emotional wellbeing of children trumps all other areas of focus because if students are not emotionally healthy and happy they won't be able to focus on learning. This makes sense because social interaction is at the core of human existence. It's as Szalavitz and Perry so elegantly state,
We live our lives in relationships. Shy or outgoing, rich or poor, famous or obscure—whoever we are, without connection, we are empty. Our interactions thrum with rhythm. From the moment of conception to the end of life, we each engage in a unique dance of connection. 1
It logically follows that one of school's main purposes should be to teach skills and strategies for building and maintaining healthy interpersonal lives. What we seek in a formal education is delivered, utilized, and applied in a social context.
Thus the ultimate purpose of this unit is to cultivate in first and second grade students an ability to take another person's perspective – to consider what a person's actions, words, and reactions tell us. My hope is that this will help them gain critical skills necessary to manage and repair their friendships when conflicts and misunderstandings arise. I want my students not only to build empathy for the other people in their lives but also for the characters they encounter in literature.
Mary Gordon, the founder of Roots of Empathy – a program designed to teach young adults empathy within a public school infrastructure – aptly conjures up a sense of what cognitive scientists refer to as Theory of Mind. She says that "literature opens the door to feelings and perspective taking. It's an invitation to be under somebody else's skin." 2 This is exactly what I hope to provide for my students through the activities and strategies outlined here. I want to help them climb into 'somebody else's skin' and consider what the world might be like from that person's point of view. And perhaps see themselves – their own words and actions – in a different light as they try on a new perspective. James Howe, a well-known children's book author, spoke recently to a room of educators about the power of literature as a way for us to rehearse for our own lives. In that moment, he affirmed what I often feel to be true, that fiction gives us an imagined reality – a safe space removed from the complications of the reality of our own life – where we can take a look into what it means to be human and part of a socially based, interconnected culture.
I want to create this safe space for the young readers in my classroom where they can uncover/discover aspects of their own lives from a removed perspective. Through a series of thoughtfully selected read-aloud texts we will practice "reading" people on the page and then hopefully transfer that skill to "reading" people in our lives. When referring to the task of "reading" people, I am merely invoking an analogy that people's body language, words, and actions can be interpreted in some of the same ways literary works might be (and vice versa). I want to cultivate a deeper literacy in which my students become adept at not only reading texts but also reading the cultural landscape as well.
Common perception about teaching young students is that broad, complex ideas must be broken into smaller, more concrete pieces. It is frequently stated that more sophisticated concepts must be "dumbed down" or simplified in order for children to begin to understand. I believe this kind of approach to the conceptualization of young children is limiting and does our youngest learners a disservice. We must not lower our expectations of what they can and cannot comprehend, but instead, within a framework of developmentally appropriate practices, respect our young students as capable of tackling complex concepts. Our job must be to empower them to use their life experiences, however limited we may judge those experiences to be, to make sense of and talk back to the world around them. They have voices full of passionate and well-developed opinions. They have the capacity to build big ideas.
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