Empathy, Dignity, and Courageous Action in Schools

How we see the world and interact with each other, especially whether we create welcoming environments of acceptance, does not always come naturally. Tim Shriver, chair of the Special Olympics, and Professor Stephanie Jones, whose research focuses on social emotional development, say that it’s something we can teach, and fostering an inclusive and accepting mindset in schools and communities matters. 

“This is not stuff that we're necessarily born with. It all grows and emerges through experiences and all kinds of things that happen in the world. So, they are malleable skills — they can be taught,” Jones says. “And I would go further and say that the decades of work in schools focused on things like social, emotional, and behavioral development have given us some ideas about the essentials of teaching and supporting these kinds of skills.”

As a longtime advocate of students with intellectual and physical disabilities, Shriver admits he was intrigued by better understanding why some people are more open to inclusion and accepting someone who may be different from them. “From any number of points of view, difference is sometimes scary. But who are the people that know how to turn that fear or that lack of familiarity into an opening, rather than using it as a closed door?” Shriver says. “So, I started to ask myself, what is an inclusive mindset? … And the more I thought about this, the more I realized, and the more I searched around issues around it, it struck me that we didn't know.”

Working together they began to identify key components of an inclusive mindset and how to foster this by acting on empathy, dignity, and courageous action. In this episode, we discuss using teachable moments where students can learn to become upstanders, and why it is important to nurture these skills in the classroom and community.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

Tim Shriver and Stephanie Jones wanted to better understand how to foster inclusion and shift mindsets to create more accepting communities. Shriver is chair of the Special Olympics, and Jones is a Harvard professor. They identified the key elements of an inclusive mindset and the behaviors that support it. An inclusive mindset means embracing and accepting people who are different from us. By developing this, they argue, we can enhance our ability to see the world through another's perspective. It's something we can learn to do.

I wanted to know why children with disabilities are often excluded, what holds their peers back from stepping up as allies, and how we can teach these skills needed to drive change. First, I asked them what led to this collaboration.

TIM SHRIVER: When you're in the field of social and emotional learning, and you're also wearing a daytime hat that focuses on special needs children, you're always looking for patterns and pathways to help people see the value and the gifts of people with intellectual developmental challenges and mindset. So, I'm wearing my Special Olympics hat, and I'm reading and studying the social emotional learning work and looking at frameworks for teaching self-regulation or relationship skills or looking for the kernels that have the greatest power to leverage change in children. Is it listening skills? Is it self-awareness? Are there ways in which relationships in schools can be very powerful, more powerful than maybe other dimensions of this? And I was asking the question for many, many years, at least in my own mind, what are the levers that can lead children to not see their peers with intellectual and developmental disabilities as less, in a demeaning or humiliating or mocking way, not to make fun of them?

Children with intellectual disabilities more likely, two or three times more likely, to get bullied, less likely to have friends, very, very unlikely to be invited to social occasions like birthday parties, almost always excluded from sports teams. The list goes on and on. So, if you're looking at the worldview of a school from the point of view of that child, you're always asking the question, what can we do to make those other children into agents of acceptance rather than agents of exclusion?

And it just struck me at one point along the way that we understood a lot about things like growth mindsets, which is a big idea in the field. We know a lot about relationship skills and how we teach them. But I started to ask myself, what do we know about the mindset of the includer, the person who's actually good at seeing someone who's different. From any number of points of view, difference is sometimes scary. But who are the people that know how to turn that fear or that lack of familiarity into an opening, rather than using it as a closed door? So I started to ask myself, what is an inclusive mindset? Like, we know what a growth mindset-- we think we know what a growth mindset is. What's an inclusive mindset? And the more I thought about this, the more I realized, and the more I searched around issues around it, it struck me that we didn't know.

STEPHANIE JONES: I think, to really do effective work in the field, whatever the field is, you have to be really clear about what you're focused on and how you define it and what it represents. That, in my view, demands a kind of framework, a way to put those ideas together and make it really transparent for others. So that was the work that we did, which is to sort of define this framework, to get deep in the literature, to identify the knowledge, the skills, the experiences that represent the components of an inclusive mindset. 

And with that in place, you can build strategies and practices. You can see it in your own work and lift it up. And it just enables a kind of transparent, cohesive, connected way of communicating about this work.

JILL ANDERSON: What is an inclusive mindset? What does it look like?

STEPHANIE JONES: We started with basically three core pillars. One is universal dignity, which is the set of beliefs that everybody has value, everybody deserves respect, everyone has rights, for example. So universal dignity. The second is empathy and perspective-taking. And those are old hats from the world of social and emotional development. So, empathy, caring about others, even those who are different from us. Perspective-taking, being able to jump inside the head of another, into the shoes of another and understand what's happening with them. So those are kind of more skill-oriented. And then the third is courageous action, which is doing something. Like, what do you do when it's really rough, when it's hard, where things are scary? Do you step in and speak up for someone who is being marginalized or who is not being included? Do you help those who are struggling with something? Or do you just help others? So, the framework rests on these core pillars. Each pillar has a kind of defined knowledge, specific skills, and then experiences that support it. And we recognize in describing the framework that these pillars and their composite skills and knowledge and experiences, they all happen inside ourselves. They happen in groups, in social groups, and they happen in communities. So, they're deeply ecological. And all of that kind of obsessive organizing of things into a framework is really just a way to set up a roadmap for those who act on it. So, if I'm doing work in any particular setting, and I want to really do something active and direct to support inclusion, I might look to the framework and say, OK, here are some things that we could do in this setting that really build the core skills of empathy and perspective taking. And here's some knowledge we can build about universal dignity and then some experiences we can set up that support all of these components.

TIM SHRIVER: But it's also teachable, Stephanie, and this is where I'm, of course, a little bit obsessive myself. So, I'll give you a quick example. We had a young woman in a focus group. She was a ninth grader. And she said, in our lunchroom, the students with intellectual disabilities all sit at the same table. So, I decided I was going to go try to sit at their table because-- and then you could almost hear her saying, I have a sense of empathy for them, I get a sense of what they're dealing with, I want to be a person who sees their dignity and acts on it. So, you can hear empathy, and you can hear perspective-taking, and you can hear dignity. And then she said, but I walked into the lunchroom, and to get to the table, you have to walk by a table that's full of sophomore boys. And the sophomore boys make fun of me. And they make fun of everybody who walks by that table. And she said, I just couldn't do it. So, what she was saying was, I didn't yet have the courage. I didn't yet have the strength to risk my own standing in the school at the hands of mocking by sophomore boys. 

Now, she wasn't saying this in a defeated way. But what I hear as a teacher is, aha, we have here a teachable moment. Let's build a role play here. Let's have her present this case study in a classroom of freshmen, girls and boys, and discuss how we can get the strength, the moral courage to resist the humiliation that might come because I'm sitting with those kids, where I want to be, but where I don't feel safe actually making the decision on my own.

So, all of a sudden, it reveals exactly how a teacher could intervene in that moment and build not a scold but the conditions in which her moral courage could be strengthened. So, these are ways in which I think this jumps way off the academic page and into real life and into a practical use for teachers but also for adults. Honestly, we're living in a culture right now that excludes and labels and puts people into camps of us versus them and calls some people bad and some people good and some people deserving and some people undeserving. And the question I think we're all struggling with is, can we-- is there such a thing-- is there a value in having an inclusive mindset? How the heck do we do this? And the framework has relevance, I think, for those sets of questions also.

JILL ANDERSON: I just want to back up before we dig a little bit more into some of those practices, I guess we'll call them. Is this something that we're born with? Or is it really something we have to learn how to do?

TIM SHRIVER: Well, my view, the nonscholarly view is all these things can be taught. And they can be strengthened by context, and they can be weakened by context. And they can be strengthened by teaching, and they can be weakened by teaching. And they can be strengthened by reinforcement, and they can be weakened by counter-reinforcement. 

So I don't think there's much in the human condition that isn't malleable. That's my view. I don't know if that's the way scientists would put it, but this certainly is malleable. When you see cultures change on issues of gender or race or sexuality or disability-- these are just the obvious headline ones. But cultures change all the time in our attitudes toward others. 

Religious hatred has almost not completely disappeared but largely receded as a dimension of American life. It's still obviously out there, with antisemitism and Islamophobia and other kinds of things. But Catholics and Jews used to hate each other, Protestants and Catholics. Those things have changed. So clearly, we can change. And the question anybody in my world asks all the time is, what are the levers that will produce the change that we're trying to produce?

So I think teaching these things in a way that strengthens them and creates contexts where they can be reinforced has an enormous potential to change attitudes and experiences.

STEPHANIE JONES: I completely agree. I think from a human development standpoint, this is not stuff that we're necessarily born with. It all grows and emerges through experiences and all kinds of things that happen in the world. So, they are malleable skills they can be taught. And I would go further and say that the decades of work in schools focused on things like social, emotional, and behavioral development have given us some ideas about the essentials of teaching and supporting these kinds of skills. Like, are there people in a setting who are modeling the skills, living them as we would like to see them? Is there explicit language about them in the setting? Do people talk about inclusion or universal dignity or whatever the skills and the specifics are? Is there direct teaching? Are there opportunities to practice and learn? Is there real agency and experience for children and youth to grow their own skills? They have opportunities to drive the learning. And those are things that we know are effective core tools. And you can manifest them in many different ways. But those things work.

JILL ANDERSON: Stephanie, you just mentioned the value of modeling, and I think a lot of people right now might look at the state of the world and question what has happened to universal dignity. Is that the hardest one to uphold? Are we just getting so far away from this idea of universal dignity, in general?

STEPHANIE JONES: I hope not. I think when you really talk to people and look at what they're doing at home and at school and in communities, I think most of the time you're seeing people uphold values of universal dignity, that they are treating those in their community with respect, and they have a belief in the value of others. I think that there's a discourse that sits above some of those foundational interactions that would lead us to believe that something else is happening. And so those two forces are kind of tangling with each other.

I don't want to get into all the politics of everything, but I think we are at a moment where these kinds of beliefs and values and skills are really being put to the test, and it's an opportunity to act with courageous action and step up and show these things, show that we believe everybody has value, that we're going to act to enforce that belief, and that we're going to use the skills we have, our emotion skills, our perspective-taking skills to perpetuate it.

TIM SHRIVER: I think the data I see suggests a very strong commitment to inclusive kinds of thinking and behavior at the interpersonal level in our country, in fact, stronger than ever. And even at the communal level, very few of the old prejudices and fears live at that level today and anywhere near the extent they used to live.

What we have is a superstructure, a culture, a cultural overlay that has become defined by adding fear to our personal experience. And fear is very easily translated into anger and exclusion. And we have a whole algorithm and a whole political structure and a whole media structure that actually monetizes keeping us afraid of each other. So, we have kind of two levels at which this is operating, in my view. But I don't think if you asked Americans today, do they believe everyone deserves dignity? I think they would say yes. Do they believe that they're empathic? I'd say probably most say, yeah, I have a lot of empathy. Do you believe that it takes courage to look out for people who are sometimes excluded? I bet most people would-- I don't know what the numbers are. It's actually an interesting question. We probably should poll it, Steph, now that we're talking about it. I bet you'd find very, very large majorities of us who say yes.

And then when they turn on the news at night, they don't make any connection between the fact that the news makes them absolutely furious at other people and absolutely incensed and more than willing to rob people of their dignity and more than willing to say, I will not take action to protect those people, whoever "those" people happen to be. So I think we're dealing with a little bit of a tale of two stories-- not two cities. It's two stories. One story we have about each other is we're getting better. We're learning more. We're understanding more deeply. We're more welcome, more open, more engaged, and learning from others. Wow, people say those things are all so important. And then on the other level, we're scared, and our fears are being turned into anger and hostility and exclusion. And the question is, which one will prevail? I obviously have my hope, kind of have committed at least my life's work to building up the inclusive muscle. But it's not easy right now. Except, when I see kids-- I go to schools where Special Olympics has been building a culture of inclusion using this framework and educating young people about how to use it and have a sense of agency, as Stephanie-- and they have assemblies.

I was just talking to kids the other day, and they're having assemblies where there are Special Olympics unified teams are playing, and it's packed, and the whole school is there, and people are cheering, and the band is playing, and the mothers and fathers are in the audience, and teachers are crying. They've never seen kids behave this way. They've never seen such an end to bullying and such a sense of compassion for each other. And these kids all walk out saying, I love you. I think we're doing really well in some respects. But the larger story is kind of hard to overcome.

JILL ANDERSON: What are some of the most effective ways to teach things like empathy and courageous action? Even your example, Tim, about that high school student, where it fell off for her was the courageous action. And I think that's a piece that a lot of folks, whether they're young or old, struggle with.

TIM SHRIVER: There's a lot of work done on teaching empathy. Some of it just has to do with naming feelings, like, how do you feel today? Most kids have mad, bad, sad, glad. Those are the four feelings most people have access to. And that's not just children by the way. Once you start to nuance that there's a lot of difference between mad and frustrated and disappointed and scared, and you start to name the different levels of those feelings, then you can start to actually say, how does your friend Stephanie feel? What do you think she's feeling right now? And you start to be able to name her feelings. And before you know it, you start to become good at seeing the feelings of others. And you've got a new empathy muscle. And you start to have a language that your teacher does, the other kids do. 

How are you feeling today, Stephanie? So, empathy is quite easy to teach, and a lot of these other things can be taught very effectively as well.

STEPHANIE JONES: There's long traditions of doing this kind of work in these specific areas in our field, human development, psychology, and education, but also in others. The really interesting thing about it is it doesn't have to be complicated. It can be simple, simple strategies in the everyday. How do you say hello in the morning? Or what kinds of things do you ask people about themselves? Like, those are all exercising some of these very basic skills.

JILL ANDERSON: How do we engage educators who might be resistant to doing this work?

TIM SHRIVER: I think one of the great gifts that Stephanie's work has is it gives us a language to talk about not just what happens in schools but what happens in our country. And whether you're for or against DEI, whether you're in the polarizing moment in which people are fighting to protect it or fighting to eliminate it, we can all be for learning how to treat each other empathically, learning how to take the perspective of another, learning to respect the dignity of others, and learning to act in ways that include others who may be unfairly pushed out.

I don't think that's political. I don't think that should be controversial at a university or a high school or a company or a faith-based institution. So, we do, as a country, have a hunger for common ground on these issues. And maybe, just maybe, this work can help provide some context for how we can start to build such a common ground.

STEPHANIE JONES: This kind of work is not specialized, and it's not extra. It's inside the everyday. In some ways, we're doing it already or we're not, but it's happening. So, if we take a lens on it that is about simple, straightforward, everyday strategies that we can weave into what we're already doing, then I think we can find a way through. And some of the examples that already came up are good examples of that, which is, what's the language of connection at the start of the day? How are you feeling today? as opposed to hang your coat up. So, you can just see how we can weave in some of this work just into how we interact on an everyday-- inside of everyday practice kind of way. The lunchroom example is a good one as well. That's happening. So, do we take advantage of the fact that something like that happens to have a quick conversation or even a tiny bit longer conversation about what it's like and what we might do as a community?

We're not necessarily adding something in. So, I think it's a matter of sort of surfacing those moments and having some tools to respond or act in those moments. And that's the second part of the work that we've been doing in the EASEL Lab with Tim and Special Olympics and their team, which is to kind of operationalize the framework into a set of activities and strategies that can be woven into the work of Special Olympics and the everyday of-- that's part two.

JILL ANDERSON: Stephanie Jones is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Tim Shriver is the chair of Special Olympics International. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.