Back to School: Using Empathy as a Pathway to Learning
โSince digital culture became part of our intimate lives, Sherry Turkle has helped us understand our complex, evolving dance with technology, using the power of data and analysis. Now, with raw and refreshing authenticity, she shares her personal journey, which serves as a powerful and poignant reminder that it is in our relationships with one another โ...Whitney Jennings |
โSince digital culture became part of our intimate lives, Sherry Turkle has helped us understand our complex, evolving dance with technology, using the power of data and analysis. Now, with raw and refreshing authenticity, she shares her personal journey, which serves as a powerful and poignant reminder that it is in our relationships with one another โ not technology โ that we find our most important source of meaning and healing.โ โ Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA, surgeon general of the United States
โOver the decades, Sherry Turkle has provided the most penetrating analyses of the relations between the human and the computational worlds. In a remarkably revealing memoir Turkle explores the personal as well as scholarly sources of her understandings and, in the process, provides a brilliant panorama of our time.โ โ Howard Gardner, renowned cognitive psychologist and author of โA Synthesizing Mindโ
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Before computers became part of the classroom experience, teachers and students engaged face-to-face. Such a setting made it easier to interpret how someone was feeling, to empathize.
โTodayโs learners have immediate and always-on access to answers and research. Yet, itโs changing the way they approach work, their capacity to reflect, reason and draw conclusions, how they feel emotionally, and how they interact with the world around them,โ says Turkle. โWhen we hide behind screens during conversations, we feel less vulnerable. That can feel like a plus, but we are paying a high price.โ
Sherry Turkle has spent more than thirty years of her professional career helping people understand the need to cultivate and leverage empathy to enhance learning. She describes her critically hailed new book, โThe Empathy Diaries: A Memoirโ (March 2021), as an โintimate ethnographyโ in which she observes and interviews people with the skills of a trained clinical psychologist. Itโs the third in a trilogy that defines the emotional experience of life in a digital culture: In โAlone Togetherโ (2011), she identified the problem of technology inhibiting empathy; in her New York Times bestseller โReclaiming Conversationโ (2015), she offered solutions; and in โThe Empathy Diariesโ she showed how these solutions could be activated in her own life.
Turkleโs insights for fostering constructive communication offer educators a unique opportunity to enrich the classroom experience. From there, students develop skills that will enable them to live fuller and more engaged lives both within and outside the digital realm.
โConversation has a tremendous role to play in education. But weโre enabling students to turn conversations into transactions, to take the easy way out,โ warns Turkle. โItโs time to put an end to that cycle and reclaim conversation in education. But the goal isnโt to just encourage more and better conversations. Itโs about teaching children and young adults how to self-reflect and build relationships, online and off.โ
What the Press Has to Say About Sherry Turkle and โThe Empathy Diariesโ