Keynote: Empathy and Engagement: (Re)humanizing the Teaching and Learning Enterprise

Friday February 24, 2017
4:00 - 5:00 PM
Pacific Ballroom

Today’s neoliberal schooling climate precludes educators from appropriately responding to the acute vulnerabilities of our nation’s most marginalized youth. There is less focus on the whole child and providing her or him with the attributes we know improve their school engagement (e.g. love, care, affirmation, support etc.), and more focus on corporatized production (e.g. test scores, state standards, and district/school bottom lines). Empathy is a significantly vital aspect of one's humanity. Empathizing is a capacity all humans possess. The application of empathy by educators to their classroom interactions demonstrates much promise for igniting student curiosity, joy, and excitement. This talk is a reflection on the intersections of empathy and engagement. The presentation will feature findings from my research on teacher empathy in multicultural classroom contexts and the utility of this construct to (re)humanize teaching and learning practices.

Presenters
Chezare A. Warren

Dr. Chezare A. Warren is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. He teaches in the nation’s #1 programs in elementary and secondary education. He has over a decade of professional experience as a public school educator, and was founding math teacher of the Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men in Chicago, IL. His work has earned him numerous accolades including Abraham Lincoln Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the 2014 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, and he was chosen as the inaugural Carl Grant Visiting Scholar to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

Dr. Warren lectures nationally on factors that produce high academic outcomes for students of color, particularly Black males in urban K-12 and postsecondary education contexts. Dr. Warren serves on the editorial boards of several academic research journals, is vice president of the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (www.crsea.org), and he has published over 25 journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, and reports. Dr. Warren holds a BS in Elementary Education with a minor in math from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MA in School Leadership (w/ an Illinois K-12 Administrative license) from Concordia University-Chicago, and a PhD in Urban Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012.

 
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