On “empathy’s end”: Teaching and learning as a journey in transformation

Abstract

I chose the two quotes above, to capture (one aspect of) the teaching and learning experience from the teachers’ and a student’s perspectives. Both these quotes were taken from Chapter 6 entitled “Trauma” from Howard Tinberg’s and Ronald Weisberger’s book, Teaching, Learning, and the Holocaust: An Integrative Approach, a book which documents in seven chapters a decade long collaborative teaching effort undertaken by an English professor (Tinberg) and a history professor (Weisberger) in a community college in Fall River, Massachusetts. The course was an interdisciplinary seminar that they called “Remembering the Holocaust in Literature and History”. I have commented about the complex issue of interdisciplinarity raised in this book in a separate paper (Chng, in press). Here, in this short commentary, I wish to take up the issue of “empathy”, an issue discussed in Chapter 6, and relate this to teaching and learning, and to the metaphors of the journey and the bystander that Tinberg and Weisberger introduced in their work. (Abstract taken from first paragraph of document)