I teach a capstone course for senior psychology majors about empathy, and have done so for more than 10 years. I moved from open class discussions about primary source readings (terrible) to using jigsaws to include all students in discussions about the reading. Worked pretty well. But it was still a class that operated via obedience, and did not give students much or any freedom or choice.
So today I went to class with the notes I have pasted below. There were a few raised eyebrows, a few nervous questions, but I could also see the wheels turning in many brains.
We'll see how it goes...
Capstone: Empathy blown up
3 things I know are true
- Empathy can improve every part of our lives
- People do their best work when they care about what they are doing
- I don’t know what you care about
My
offer to you is that you can work on something you care about as long
as empathy is involved, and I will help you. This project can replace
everything on the syllabus going forward.
My hope is that you produce something that means something to you and that you are proud of.
Still
ungraded. If you create something meaningful and that you are proud of
then that’s an A in my book. If you just want to pass the class, we can
figure out something that is worth a C. No judgment. You are in charge
of your workload and final grade.
You
creating something meaningful to you is more important to me than you
doing any specific reading or assignment. So you can throw away the
syllabus, say goodbye to Perusall, forget about all those articles, read
the Alda book if you want to. It’s really good.
You can work on your own or in groups
I
have no guidelines for what the end result of this project is because I
cannot foresee what you will want to do. I will brainstorm with you if
you want me to.
What do you care about?
- What will you do after graduation?
How can empathy help you succeed in that endeavor?
- What worries you about the future?
How can empathy help you address those challenges?
- What are your passions, hobbies?
How can empathy increase your pleasure?
Some of MY ideas for projects:
- Devise
a plan to improve your own empathy over the next 10 weeks, carry it
out, and see if it worked. Get ideas for how to improve your empathy
from research (some are on syllabus)
- Perform
an ‘empathy audit’ for the job you intend to have, describing how
empathy is required in that job and how you could be better at that job
if you improved your empathy. I bet there are studies about empathy an
any job you want to have
- How
is empathy related to climate change? Can empathy be used to get people
to take climate change seriously and change their behavior? What do you
find if you search for studies about empathy and climate change?
- How are our devices impacting empathy? What can we do about it? Is there research about devices and/or social media and empathy?
- How
is empathy related to the upcoming Presidential election? Are there
candidates that are low or high in empathy? Are there candidates that
are using empathy in their messages? There’s a cool body of research
called political psychology
- Are you creative? Make something creative related to empathy.
- Write a research proposal.
- What
was the paper/project/activity that you most enjoyed and/or got the
most out of as a college student? What about it was so great? Can you do
that again about empathy?
- There
are some interesting readings in the syllabus that we haven’t gotten to
yet about religion, virtual reality, literature, trauma, therapy,
prejudice, and politics. Read those for ideas?
But these are things that I care about. What do you care about?
I
hope what you’ve learned as a psyc major is that the best ideas are
backed up with evidence, and that intuition is a very poor substitute
for that evidence.
What will help you produce something meaningful that you are proud of?
- Accountability
- Activity journal
- Periodic individual meetings with me
- Revision
- Input from multiple sources
- Other?
If
you don’t want to take on this project you can complete this course as
laid out in the syllabus. We’ll figure out how to do that.
Let’s finish the project we are working on right now, Who needs to know. This can be the seed of an idea for your project. So bring that paper to class Thursday.
Next Tuesday I want to know what you want to do for the rest of the semester.
