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Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy: Advancing Social Justice by Improving Social Cognition through Literary Study
- Author(s):
- Mark Bracher (see profile)
- Contributor(s):
- Deborah Barnbaum, Michael Byron, Tammy Clewell, Nancy Docherty, Françoise Massardier-Kenney, David Pereplyotchik, Susan Roxburgh, Elizabeth Smith-Pryor
- Date:
- 2022
- Group(s):
- TC Cognitive and Affect Studies, TM Literary and Cultural Theory, TM The Teaching of Literature
- Subject(s):
- Literature--Study and teaching, Social justice, Empathy, Psychology and literature, Cognitive psychology, Cognitive science
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- compassion, Social Cognition, higher education studies, General Education, Literary education, Pedagogy of literature, Cognitive literary studies, Cognitive science
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/n062-6424
- Abstract:
- Previous studies suggest that narrative fiction promotes social justice by increasing empathy, but critics have argued that the partiality of empathy severely limits its effectiveness as an engine of social justice, and that what needs to be developed is universal compassion rather than empathy. We created Compassion-Cultivating Pedagogy (CCP) to target the development of two social-cognition capabilities that entail compassion: (1) recognition of self-other overlap and (2) cognizance of the situational, uncontrollable causes of bad character, bad behavior, and bad life-outcomes. Employing a pre/post within- and between-subjects design, we found that students in the CCP classes, but not students in conventionally taught classes, improved in these two areas of social cognition and also exhibited increased preference for compassionate social policies for stigmatized groups. This finding suggests that pedagogy can play a significant role in literature’s contribution to social justice, and that further efforts to develop and test pedagogies for improving social cognition are warranted.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 9 months ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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