Research for Empathy
By Ray Salazar
In my Chicago high school classroom, two to three times a quarter, students produce writing that can live and breathe outside the classroom. Usually, research papers don’t make the cut. As the 2017 New Yorker article “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds” explains, “Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help [to convince them]; they simply discount [the facts that go against their preconceived notions]. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science.”
Was there a way research could become an opportunity to balance emotions with logic? As a graduate student in DePaul’s writing program, I shaped articles from interviews. The emotion drove the storyline. Statistics and quotes from experts contextualized the person’s experience. I realized, magazine articles resembled research papers — and they were more interesting to read.
But, instead of giving students a list of typical topics, like relationships, teens and body image, balancing responsibilities, I said, “Find somebody interesting,” a person who experienced an emotional, psychological, or physical journey; whose struggle mattered to them as individuals and to our school community; and who was willing to share their story.
One high school junior, Alejandro, revisited an experience that he couldn’t understand at the time it happened: when he was nine years old, his mother first showed signs of mental illness. “It was hard for me to interview my mom because we really don’t talk about mental health. I asked her questions that I’m not used to asking.” The research he found contradicted what he thought. From the Yale Global Health Review, Alejandro learned that “mental health in Mexico is recognized as one of the main unresolved issues within the government’s health policy agenda.” This young man now understood how his mother’s emotional trauma was exacerbated by cultural norms and governmental avoidance of an important issue, and, as difficult as the conversations were, he appreciated the opportunity to have the conversation with his mother: “This is something that should really be talked about more.”
Want to invite your students to do this work? Here’s our process.
Guidelines for the Researched Interview
Two-Page Profile: Students start by producing a two-page profile of the person’s experience. This profile follows the structure we see in most magazine features: introduction with the conflict, background, the experience, an emotional high point, and some indication of implications. One of the essays we read to help students see this structure is “What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?” from the New York Times Magazine.
To ensure a thought-provoking and evocative piece, students generate questions about the person’s background, knowledge of the situation, behavior before and after the experience, their values because of this, and their feelings about themselves and the situation.
Research: Students gather research that provides context for the person’s experience and use that to expand the profile into a five-page research paper. The New York Times article is their mentor text. They look for answers to these questions:
- Why is this issue a problem or cause for debate?
- Who is affected by it? How and why?
- Who is working to address this? How?
- What are other views people ignore, forget, or might be unaware of?
- Who or what is preventing the social issue from being resolved?
- What are the benefits of addressing this issue?
To decrease the chances of them quoting sources that sensationalize the topic, students vet databases and new sources for reliability (such as the search option at the Atlantic and National Public Radio). They document the answer to the question, who provided it, and the title and date of the source.
When they have quite a few answers from a variety of sources, they cut each piece of information into strips. Then they tape the information to the section of the profile where it fits to create an outline.
Expand Profile into Five-Page Article: Then students merge the person’s experience with the research. Sometimes the information complements each other, sometimes not. The student’s responsibility is to create links for the reader between the profile and the research by adding commentary that evokes an appropriate emotion in the reader. We use a chart of the six basic emotions to figure out if they want the information to evoke indignation, concern, or calm, for example. Their commentary can be biased, of course, but they cannot indoctrinate or lecture the audience or sensationalize the situation. They must let the information reveal truths to the reader.
Deliver an Argumentative Speech: While the speech should inform our community about the issue, each student needs to present an argument using the three-part structure I developed years ago — which gets them away from the rudimentary thesis with three reasons. The story and research they present then becomes an opportunity for students to present a specific change they’d like to see based on what they learned.
For my student Maria, the experience of interviewing her mother about a miscarriage she experienced fourteen years ago brought them closer. She got to this topic by asking them, “What’s something you haven’t talked to me about?”
During the research process, Maria found that “I couldn’t just talk about miscarriages. I had to dig deeper. I didn’t know that women can become depressed from a miscarriage. I thought it was something they just move on from. Research tells us that we have to talk about it so it’s less difficult to get over.” For Maria, the research helped her normalize the topic within her family, affecting not only her but her sisters, and her speech gave her an opportunity to remove the topic’s stigma for her classroom community.
Through these experiences — the profile, the research paper, and the speech — students learned how to talk with someone about a sensitive issue, how to research, and how to communicate someone else’s experience in a responsible way. Maria shared, “Overall it was hard. But I know how to communicate for a greater purpose now.”
Ray Salazar began his Chicago Public Schools career as an English teacher in 1995. For the last eight years, he’s written a blog about education and Latino issues called The White Rhino. Follow him @WhiteRhinoRay
