Empathic Framing during Concept Development in Book Club Discussions in a Service-Learning Teacher Education Class

This study investigates the emergence of empathic framing in a small group of university students’ discussions of equity-oriented concepts in a service-learning course. Empathic framing refers to the making of emotional connections that enable one to experience the world from another’s perspective, particularly when they are from different cultures, means of socialization, and life experiences. The study used collaborative coding for both concepts and empathic framing in six discussions of three scholarly books devoted to different equity concerns focused on the phenomenon of teacher-student reciprocal burnout, the differential experiences of affiliative or ‘jock’ students and disaffiliative or ‘burnout’ students, and African American speech and its political consequences. The findings identify examples of empathic framing in the six discussions, with most instances occurring in the two books that include narrative accounts of people experiencing oppression and inequity; the final volume, centered on textuality more than human action, produced a single instance of empathic framing recruited from outside the book’s contents. The study suggests that empathy can serve as a beginning point to concept development toward more equitable teaching and school culture, and can be available for formal academic learning when it is combined with worldly experience such as that available in service-learning courses.