Volume 2, Issue 1 - 2020
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Empathy is a transformative force in human relationships that can lead people to value all human life while developing an appreciation and understanding for people in challenging circumstances. It can also be economically beneficial to society. How does scholarship on empathy in a compassionate society connect to schooling in the United States? In this paper, I connect how empathy can forward education and how an empathy-infused pedagogy employing specific texts and examples can benefit schools writ large.
Since the publication of Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Crisis in Education” (1954/1968), many scholars have responded to the ideas set forth in her work. Most of these scholars debate, analyze, and expand upon a foundational element of Arendt’s notion that educators are responsible for the child and the world. Arendt argued that which is revolutionary in the child should be conserved through education, and the educator must present to the child “the world as it is” (p. 189) in order for constant renewal of the world to take place. The child must understand the world in its present state so that they are equipped with the knowledge to act as agents of change. Scholars who analyze and critique Arendt’s ideas have tended to focus on foundational elements of her argument: natality, world-alienation, and thinking. Missing from the discussions of Arendt’s work, and in these subsequent scholarly considerations, is the underlying role of
emotion in the educator’s responsibility to cultivate that which is revolutionary in the child. I discuss natality, world-alienation, and thinking and how they each relate to emotion. The cultivation of emotional intelligence is necessary for political existence. As educators, understanding our emotions and being able to recognize the emotions of others are essential to becoming agents of renewal.
This article analyzes some of the impact of neoliberalism on higher education in the US. Our colleges and universities are under significant pressure from neoliberalism. I offer an extended definition of neoliberalism. I then move to general ways neoliberalism has influenced the academy. Next, I highlight three critical ways neoliberalism has penetrated and subverted the academy: the preeminence of college athletics in many of our colleges and universities, the defunding and de-prioritization of the humanities and social sciences, and the overall commodification of higher education. In addition, I explicate other concerns that cascade from these three areas. The article concludes with a vision for a better future of higher education.
Within the field of student affairs, a field primarily concerned with applied practice, where is the space for philosophical contemplation? In this argument, I connect student affairs practice with philosophy of orientation(s) through hermeneutic phenomenology. As a department that is ubiquitous within higher education, what does student orientation signify? By, toward, around, and from what are students oriented? Through a hermeneutic phenomenology of the orientation in student orientation, I aim to uncover the orientation in new student orientation, which
is not about caring for new students themselves, but instead, the orientation is the institution itself and the degree to which a new student is able to successfully embody the spaces of their institution.