‘Empathy is a Better Emotion’: The Trouble with Empathy in High Stakes English Classrooms

ABSTRACT

Although interdisciplinary scholars have long debated the ethics of empathy, it continues to be widely seen as universal, prosocial, and reparative in education. Subject English, long associated with the work of producing civilised, moral and cultured students, is a critical locus for the activation of empathy. But what becomes of empathy in the high stakes senior secondary English classroom? Drawing on an in-school ethnography, the paper begins to map the ways in which empathy is activated through and around set literary texts in Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) English classrooms in Australia. In so doing, it highlights the unpredictable nature of empathy as a relation exceeding pedagogical mediation, as well as the troublesome aspects of empathy entangled with neoliberal imperatives and the interpellation of the civilised English student. Finally, it turns to the generative possibilities of an empathy unsettled – an unruly empathy.

KEYWORDS:

• Senior English
• VCE
• empathy
• emotion
• difficult knowledge
• literary pedagogy
• text selection

Introduction

As the teacher walks with her students out of the classroom and down the corridor,there is a hum of quiet excitement – the novelty of a changing scene. They carry their copies of The Women of Troy, pens, notebooks and computers, and they stroll, relaxed, into the senior common room. Sofas are spun, cups of tea and coffee are placed down on tables, and the class now face each other in a long oval formation. As books open, the teacher assigns reading roles, and a small performance begins. The reading unfolds and the teacher gestures to stop – she rereads certain lines slowly, looking into her students’ eyes with a muted though pained expression: the ‘blood smeared temples’, the ‘screams and moans’ of the Trojan women, ‘now chattel, prisoners of war’. Her students tell her that they find this difficult – the wailing of the suffering women, ‘confronting’. She nods in understanding and waits for them to elaborate. With silence returned, she closes her book and shifts in her chair. ‘You know’, she begins softly, ‘I come from a war-torn family, and many of you will have stories about this too … ’

Returning to the reading after sharing something of her grandparents’ experiences of grief and trauma as Romanian refugees, the teacher brings a sense of levity and amusement to the room by comparing Poseidon’s egocentric monologue to Trumpian rhetoric. But soon again, she pivots, stopping the reading, slowly pointing out and reinforcing the ‘cruelty’ and ‘brutality’ of the assault on Cassandra – shades of sadness and disgust in her voice. Clicking her pen, in the same breath, she then asks plainly, ‘OK, so – what key themes can we see here and annotate?’

This vignette is a shadow of an event I observed and experienced in an in-school ethnography with a Year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) English class studying Don Taylor’s translation of The Women of Troy. It illustrates some of the ways in which the feelings of the teacher and her students are naturally and strategically mediated during an exercise of literary study. Empathy, although not mentioned in the VCE English curriculum, begins to emerge in this scene as the teacher models an empathetic response for the suffering Trojan women by feeling with them, a sense of pain in her voice when reading and discussing their grief and trauma, and by showing a sense of understanding by making personal connections to her family history. Yet, at the same time, the reading and reflecting is punctuated by directions away from feeling and connecting; explicit and strategic instructions to annotate the text according to assessable outcomes echo as constant refrains. Here, we have something of the complex interplay of pedagogical intentions towards empathy and curriculum/assessment pressures in a senior secondary English classroom – a key concern of this paper.

Although empathy has been a motif in previous work on VCE English teachers and their pedagogical choices (Kitt 2019; McLean Davies and Buzacott 2022), it has yet to be closely theorised and mapped in relation to set literary texts and the high-stakes, acute neoliberal imperatives of this context. Following the path of feminist affect scholars concerned with entanglements of power, affect and subjectivity (Ahmed 2004–2014, 2006; Berlant 2006, 2014; Cvetkovich 2003, 2012; Sedgwick 1997, 2003), the paper is guided by the provocation: how is empathy activated through and around set literary texts in VCE English? I approach this task from the positionality of a female white-settler teacher-researcher, invested in the potential of critical and anti-racist pedagogies, whilst also reckoning with the ‘affective dissonance’ (Lobb 2022, 94) of my culpability and discomfort as a white feminist empathiser teaching the same multicultural texts in senior English and understanding the conflicts of personal/professional desires and curriculum constraints of senior classes quite personally.

The paper follows with an overview of the research project, and then briefly explicates the VCE English context with respect to high stakes assessments and literary study. It then problematises empathy as an affective practice and disposition, challenging its normative positivity. Finally, it maps the movements of empathy identified in the data from VCE English classrooms and draws conclusions about the limitations and possibilities of empathy in this context.

The study, set texts and method

The research project was inspired by my experiences as an English teacher working with emotionally provocative or what has been called difficult knowledge (Britzman 1998; Pitt and Britzman 2003) texts – confronting narratives of a violent or traumatic nature – in the high-stakes VCE English space. The key question guiding the project was what feelings and emotions emerge in and around set literary texts in VCE English curriculum and practice and what might these affects do? To identify and follow threads of affect, I conducted close readings for language relating to emotion or feeling (Berg et al. 2019) of policy documents (in the accreditation period 2016–2023) alongside an in-school ethnography that sought to attune to explicit or implicit layers of feeling. The ethnography, conducted in 2022 in a Catholic girls’ school in South-East Melbourne, spanned six months and included two VCE English classes as they undertook literary analysis units. Data collected from the in-school ethnography included teacher interviews, student surveys, classroom observations, and annotated copies of set texts from students and teachers. Affect, emotion and feeling were key analytic frames for data analysis (Schulz et al. 2023), from which, empathy emerged both in the explicit language of teachers and students in interviews and surveys, and in the more implicit feelings documented in classroom observations as well as in student textual annotations. Because empathy does not appear in the VCE English curriculum or policy documents from this accreditation period, the findings explored below draw exclusively from ethnographic data. The absence of empathy in policy and curriculum documents thus highlights an interesting discrepancy between the official or intended curriculum, and the espoused and enacted curricula represented in the study.

Participating teachers and students self-identified as white or Anglo-Australian female or did not specify. Teacher participants were both experienced and accomplished English teachers but were of differing generations and held contrasting teaching philosophies. The Year 11 class were undertaking Unit 2, Area of Study 1 (Reading and Comparing Texts), commonly referred to as ‘the comparative unit’. In this unit, students were tasked with reading and comparing Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race (2016) with George Tillman Jr’s film The Hate U Give (2018). Both contemporary texts centre experiences of racial violence, prejudice and injustice, and these were taken up as thematic frames in the learning activities that can be broadly categorised as following a skills-based approach (see Macken-Horarik 2014) and a careful adherence to the perceived bounds of the curriculum as encapsulated by interview statements such as, ‘I want them to be able to talk about stylistic structures and features and how the text operates as a vehicle’. The Year 12 class were undertaking Unit 3, Area of Study 1 (Reading and Responding), more commonly known in schools as ‘the text response’ – an in-depth study of a single text as a product of its contemporary moment. Don Taylor’s translation of Euripides’ play The Women of Troy (415 BC) was the set text. Euripides’ tragedy gives voice to the enslaved Trojan women of Homeric legend as they lay in the ruins of their decimated city. The Year 12 teacher’s pedagogical style, in contrast to their colleague, spanned approaches of critical literacy (e.g. Luke 2012) and personal growth (e.g. Dixon 1975). For example, in interviews, she referred to her desire to ‘get [students] to engage on a personal level’, to bring ‘soul’ into their interpretations by ‘creating relationships and empowering [them] to have a bit more voice’. She also described an intention to make the text study ‘relatable’ to students with ‘popular and accessible’ contemporary examples that were then borne out in the classroom with references to global conflicts, popular films and personal anecdotes, as exemplified by the opening vignette. The pedagogical intentions of both teachers and their beliefs as to the boundaries of text study in this context played a key role in the invocation and mediation of empathy, as discussed in the findings below.

Before moving on, it is important to elaborate on a significant limitation of the study with respect to consenting participants and researcher subjectivity. Although the classes involved in the ethnography were not homogenous, the consenting participants were similar in terms of self-identifying as white and female. I was therefore unable to document the words of non-white and non-binary (or non-female, in the context of a girls’ school) students in the same way, neglecting a vital and often overlooked dimension of the student experience. It is deeply regrettable and unfortunate that the data set thus reflects the ongoing marginalisation of these voices. This gap is particularly pertinent with respect to the Year 11 study of two texts that centre on racism; these literary representations will stick differently to non-white students (Ahmed 2004–2014), leading to fundamentally different experiences with empathy that require attention in further studies. It is also, however, vital for white teachers and students to actively confront and engage with concepts and narratives about racism and for white researchers to attend these engagements. As McIntyre (1997) writes,

Whites need to take responsibility to educate ourselves about ‘the Other’ which means reading about people of colour – their histories, their lived experiences – in their own words. It means not relying on people of colour to teach us about themselves, or about ourselves, or about racism and the impact of racism on their/our lives. (139)

The literary encounters and ‘white talk’ (McIntyre 1997) around empathy for racialised figures captured by the study are therefore illuminating and important for confronting and dismantling racism. Similarly, I continue to reflect on my own whiteness in terms of attuning to and understanding the feelings circulating in institutions and practices shaped by colonial imperatives and histories that privilege and affect me differently. In a similar vein, I declare and reflect on my own entanglements with the school in which the research project took place as an insider researcher (Holmes 2020). At the time of data collection, I was familiar to participants as an English teacher working at the school. The research can therefore be seen as lacking the objectivity of an external perspective (Holmes 2020), but I have strived (to the extent that it is possible) to take a position of ‘empathetic neutrality’ (Ormston et al., 2014) with respect to the data collection and analysis.

Literature & reading practices in VCE English

Senior secondary students in Victoria must undertake at least three units from the English subjects, Literature, English Language, or English and English as an Additional Language, to receive their Victorian Certificate of Education. The latter of these offerings (referred to herein for brevity as VCE English) is the most generalist and popular, with approximately 40,000 students taking the course in 2023 (VCAA 2023b). Debates around set texts in VCE English have been fervent and sustained (see Horton and McLean Davies 2022), with much criticism in recent years pointing towards the lack of diversity and representation in the text list (Bacalja and Bliss 2019; Bliss and Bacalja 2020; McLean Davies, Truman, and Buzacott 2021).

Although the VCE English text list aims to ‘reflect engagement with global perspectives’ (VCAA 2023b), studies drawing on examination data reveal that canonical texts often occupy a central position as what is most frequently taught in senior English classrooms (Patterson 2012). Proponents of literature as a means to nurture healing and empathy, Martha Nussbaum for example (1990; Nussbaum 1995, 1997) have long celebrated these canonical texts; however, it is necessary to consider how the English canon carries affective forces into English classrooms that can shape subject positionings and relations by frequently centring and perpetuating masculinity, heterosexuality, and whiteness as norm and those outside this norm as Other (McLean Davies, Truman, and Buzacott 2021; Morrison 1994,; Phillips, McLean Davies, and Truman 2022; Snaza 2019; Thiel and Dernikos 2020; Truman 2019, 2023). As Truman (2019) explains, ‘whiteness continues to circulate through and cling to many of the core texts, narratives and messages that make up English literary education’ (53), and even when teachers might try to position students as empathisers towards marginalised peoples with texts like Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, a critical examination of the ‘subtext, and the absence of character development for Robinson’ is needed, as this ‘teaches that Black people are available as props for whiteness to re-affirm itself – in this case a particularly sticky moral whiteness that relies on Black death’ (56). The cumulative effect of these kinds of literary encounters may work to perpetuate exclusionary binaries of norm/Other and ‘inflict trauma’ on readers through ‘foster[ing] and reinforc[ing] a narrow view of race, gender and/or sexuality, among other things’ (Dernikos 2018, 2). And even when teachers select texts that seek to unsettle the English canon, the gravity of high-stakes assessments continues to influence the ways in which students are positioned in relation to their texts (Phillips, McLean Davies, and Truman 2022), often stymying or restricting possibilities for creative and critical, or deeply felt literary encounters.

Moreover, because the reading is compulsory and VCE English students have little agency in choosing texts that reflect their interests,¹ their particular ‘mental set’ (Rosenblatt 1982, 268) towards the text is telically driven: the reading is work that must be completed to pass the subject (McGraw and Mason 2019). This, compounded by the enduring influence of ‘traditional habits and assumptions about “doing English”’ (Doecke and Hayes 1999, 36) such as creating summaries and glossaries of quotes or construction devices, answering comprehension questions or completing passage analyses and passive essays, as well as the need to assess through quantifiable and rankable pieces, consecrate a rational mode of reading and responding in senior English.² There may be scope for emotional or personal responses through School-Assessed Coursework (SAC) tasks, where senior teachers have some flexibility to design assessment pieces that demonstrate an understanding of the mandated study outcomes. However, questions of authenticity and performativity stemming from the overarching imperative to quantify and rank remain inescapable. These contextual pressures, in addition to the characteristics of unique classrooms, position students to adopt certain stances in relation to texts and characters from the outset, including orientations towards or away from a personal, ethical kind of empathy.

Empathy: beyond a panacea

Ostensibly, empathy would be considered a prosocial, enriching or reparative ideal. Indeed, common parlance would define empathy as a kind of imaginative internalisation of another’s perspective, experiences, thoughts and feelings such that a positive bridge be established between diverse lives for social justice aims. A feeling with another, rather than a feeling for (Cooper 2011). Educators and policymakers have often turned to empathy ‘as if it were a quasi-magical recipe formulated to solve issues of injustice and ongoing crises’ (Mezzenzana and Peluso 2022, 2). It is this hopeful, reparative construction of empathy is widely taken up in education discourses as an ideal teacherly disposition (Meyers et al. 2019; Warren 2018) or as an important skill to inculcate in students (Franzese 2017; O’Grady 2020), particularly through reading literature (Duncan, Bess-Montgomery, and Osinubi 2017; Nussbaum 1990, 1995, 1997). Indeed, the role of the English teacher in cultivating empathy is deep-seated in the history of subject English, entangled with age-old and enduring imperatives to produce civilised, cultured, and well-read students (Doecke and Yandell 2019; Hunter 1988; McLean Davies and Sawyer 2020; Patterson 1993, 2014). An empathetic disposition as an enduring characteristic of the civilised English student is exemplified in landmark discipline defining documents, including the Cox Report of 1989, where literary study in English is described as:

enabl[ing] pupils to share the experience of others. They will encounter and come to understand a wide range of feelings and relationships by entering vicariously the worlds of others. (94, as quoted by McLean Davies and Sawyer 2020, 153)

Contemporary scholars of English education in Australia continue to centre empathy as a key feature of the moralising work English teachers do with texts (Gates and Curwood 2023). This is also a common refrain in the professional discourse of Australian English teachers, who make assertions such as, ‘[o]ur students look to us to teach them many things, but through these novels, we can teach them arguably one of the most important skills in life: empathy’ (Maserow 2021, 54) and who maintain a belief in the perceived natural ‘link between empathy and reading and writing’ (McLean Davies and Buzacott 2022, 372). But this view of empathy often espoused by English teachers, as universally accessible and inherently moral, is deeply problematic (see Kukar 2016; Mezzenzana and Peluso 2022; Pedwell 2014, 2016; Throop 2008, 2010). Empathy is asymmetrical: it can ‘invit[e] problematic appropriations or projections on the part of “privileged” subjects’ (Pedwell 2016, 10). Moreover, the assumption of a universal accessibility of an empathetic experience fails to account for neurodivergence, the influence of diverse personal histories and the ways in which some people are conditioned or positioned differently – the privileged status of empathiser may be put ‘within the reach’ of ‘certain kinds of bodies’ (Ahmed 2006, 111) and not others. Finally, although English teachers may ask students to empathise with certain represented lives, they cannot control which figures and perspectives students will actually empathise with; not all empathetic relations with literary representations will be ethical (see Boler 1999; Snaza 2019).

Inspired by the critical impetus to complicate the ‘unexamined normative positivity’ of empathy (Lobb 2022, 85), this paper constructs empathy as an ambivalent affective practice and disposition (Lobb 2022; Pedwell 2014; 2016, Hemmings 2012). In other words, empathy is seen as a social relation that can be activated in ethical or unethical ways and is made available to certain bodies to take up and then direct towards others. A neutral conceptualisation of empathy allows me to explore and complicate empathetic practices in terms of how they might influence teaching and learning, as well as the ways in which teachers and students see themselves and their capacity to act in the world (Healy and Dianne 2021; Mulcahy 2019; Watkins 2006, 2016).

Pedagogies of empathy are often closely associated with discomfort (Keddie 2022; Porto and Zembylas 2020; Zembylas and Papamichael 2017), and so it matters how discomfort is conceptualised vis-à-vis empathy. Hemmings (2012), Lobb (2022) and Boler (1999) assert that for a genuine or transformative mode of empathy to occur, discomfort – and recognition of this discomfort – is key, whereas Keen (2007) argues that ‘because novel reading can be so easily stopped or interrupted by an unpleasant emotional reaction to a book […] personal distress has no place in a literary theory of empathy’ (208). It is my view that because empathy is so intimately associated with performing moral goodness, there is something generative and necessary in feeling discomfort, and without discomfort, the empathy may be superficial (Ngo 2017) or even deleterious and regressive (Boler 1999).

In subject English, empathy is ‘densely knotted in with connected social practices’ (Wetherell 2012, 14) that carry their own affective baggage and orientation devices, such as normative literacies and standardised assessments. Moreover, students also have their own orientations and unique affective histories that will influence the ways they read and engage in classroom activities around the reading (Purcell 2023). By orientations and orientation devices, I draw upon the work of Ahmed (2006) to speak to the condition of being directed towards, or away from, certain objects and subjectivities. Orientation devices deployed within societal and cultural contexts can range from explicit directives and discourses, to subtle and insidious norms, and shape our understanding of the world and our place within it. As Ahmed explains, ‘[t]he lines that allow us to [orient ourselves], those that are “in front” of us, also make certain things, and not others, available’ (2006, 14). We might ask, for instance, how do pedagogical models of personal growth or critical literacy orient student-readers towards or away from the position of empathiser-subject? How might classroom norms and emotion rules orient student-readers towards certain felt responses by occluding those constructed as deviant or inappropriate (Sosa, Hall, and Collins 2021) such as discomfort and empathy?

Findings: how is empathy activated through and around set literary texts in VCE English?

Empathy through critical personal growth

Teachers play a key role in mediating the affective landscape of the classroom through their pedagogical choices (Mulcahy 2019; Watkins 2006, 2016). Without explicit invocations of empathy in the curriculum, it was through a pedagogical approach of ‘critical personal growth’ (McLean Davies and Buzacott 2022, 372) that empathetic ways of relating to characters in the texts were activated in the Year 12 English classroom. A critical personal growth pedagogy draws on aspects of personal growth, which centres on the subjective and emotional experience of the student-reader and their enrichment through the reading experience (Dixon 1975), and a critical literacy approach, which closely examines social context to question meaning and challenge hegemonies (Luke 2012). With empathy as a bonding agent, theoretically, this approach remits common criticisms of personal growth as self-centred (Rosen 1977) or inauthentic (Patterson 1993) but may actually exacerbate the ways in which critical pedagogy promotes and disciplines certain ‘noble sentiments’ of ‘“commitment”, “devotion”, and “faith”’ (Yoon 2005, 717). This said, a critical personal growth approach may also theoretically provide the necessary groundwork for teachers to cultivate an active empathy by ‘connec[ting] the dots between reactions to fiction and options for action in the real world’ (Keen 2007, 147).

Empathy, as an aim of a pedagogy of critical personal growth, was explicitly invoked by the Year 12 teacher in interviews and classroom instruction. Looking to enhance students’ capacities for empathy whilst also questioning historical and contemporary injustices, the Year 12 teacher explained their desire to move students towards empathy for the suffering characters of Euripides’ the Women of Troy:

[In their first reading, my students] were really opposed to all the crying and the wailing. I would say that means that they probably don’t show as much empathy towards […] when people show outbursts of emotion, and I think that will challenge them to be a little bit more empathetic about people’s pain.

In communal classroom readings of the text, students were routinely asked to pause, to ‘stop and imagine’ the suffering of the Trojan women: ‘imagine the wailing and crying – their sons slaughtered – city burnt’. These group readings were also interrupted by the teacher’s personal musings and family history, as they made connections between the suffering of the Trojan women and the experiences of their Romanian refugee grandparents. Students were engrossed in these moments of personal sharing, and through the scaffolding of critical personal growth, were asked to consider their own lineage and personal connections to the kinds of suffering represented in the text and evident in the historical or contemporary world. In this way, students were oriented towards introspection and an empathetic feeling with the suffering Trojan women.

Empathy opened by the invitations of difficult knowledge texts

The ethical invitations or affective provocations of difficult knowledge texts may spark empathetic relations between readers and characters. Difficult knowledge can be understood as the process of encountering knowledge that deeply unsettles the learner and their worldview (Britzman 1998). Although difficult knowledge is not a static quality, rather, ‘a process of engagement’ (Garrett 2011, 322), much of what can be understood as difficult knowledge texts are narratives that are emotionally provocative and disturbing, for instance, depicting domestic abuse or racial violence. Through narratives of trauma, difficult knowledge texts often ask readers to bear witness to suffering (Caruth 1995) or the plight of the Other, and by ‘utilis[ing] affective techniques’ (Schulz et al. 2023, 2) in their composition, they make certain invitations to readers: invitations to believe, to take up ethical positions and to feel (Groeben 2011; Gregory 2010) in relation to represented lives. Discomfort, as a precursor to empathy, may be one such invitation or provocation of a difficult knowledge text, as identified in student survey responses.

In anonymous surveys on their feelings about the set texts completed at the end of the study, several Year 11 students studying The Hate Race and The Hate U Give appeared to navigate difficult knowledge, noting feelings of upset and confrontation as precursors to their empathic feelings for characters. For instance,

At times I felt uncomfortable reading or listening to derogatory terms being used, however it did give attention to the real life issues in society that we are often sheltered from. Throughout the more graphic scenes I did find it very difficult to sit through them as I felt very confronted and upset by what happened to each protagonist.

The same student then linked this encounter with difficult knowledge to an empathetic relation:

I felt very upset and empathetic towards the characters, although not fully relating to the discrimination they faced, I was still upset and confronted by the texts.

There were also explicit acknowledgements from students about the challenge of confronting racism in the texts as white readers, such as this response:

Both books have quite violent depictions of the effects of racism and I was angered by the horrific racism and alienation directed at young children. […] As a white woman, in a class of predominantly white peers, it’s quite confronting dealing with topics of racism and discrimination. But that’s the primary reason it’s important.

This self-reflexive consideration of white discomfort, provoked by the invitations of these difficult knowledge texts to empathise with racialised characters, suggests a readiness to move away from ‘wilfully ignorant empathy’ (Lobb 2022, 90), towards more critically aware, ethical relations (Pedwell 2014).

Responses to textual invitations and provocations towards empathy are also seen in personal annotations in student copies of set texts. Although students in this context are routinely instructed to take notes that are closely scripted by the teacher, these particular annotations were unprompted and unrelated to the learning activities. As these annotations are not assessed nor are they subject to teacher or peer surveillance, they can be seen as private comments between reader and text: residues of bilateral textual transactions (Rosenblatt 1994). The force of The Hate Race, or the text’s invitation to feel with Maxine, the protagonist and author, precipitated several personal notes from students.

Responding to the prologue scene in which Maxine is violently verbally abused on a Melbourne street, one student underlined powerfully emotive phrases such as ‘Go drown your kid!’ and ‘pulse-in-my-temples fear’ (Beneba Clarke 2016, vi) and noted ‘What a vile man!’ – positioning themselves in relation with Maxine and in opposition to the perpetrator. Further personal notes that seem to show an empathetic perspective-taking, a feeling with Maxine, include the later note, ‘This is so devastating’, after Maxine describes her desire for vitiligo to make her as white as her peers. Of course, not all students can or will accept the invitations or provocations of texts in this manner and use this discomfort generatively, reaching for empathy as they feel with characters. Other student annotations were more ambiguous in terms of revealing something of an empathetic connection with Maxine. For example, one student in this class forcibly erased violent language and racist slurs from their copy of The Hate Race by redacting the text with black marker. Perhaps, this was an act of outrage and horror – a refusal to perpetuate the existence of this kind of racist language. Or, perhaps, the described abuse was all too much for the student to bear and the erasure evidences a refusal to feel the discomfort and empathise with Maxine.

Empathy as a technology of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, broadly understood as ‘instal[ing] apparatuses and knowledges through which people are reconfigured as productive economic entrepreneurs’ (Davies and Bansel 2007, 248), has saturated the English curriculum; for instance, institutionalising standardised literacies (Christie 2003), shaping pedagogies and teacher identities (McKnight 2016), and commodifying the reading experience (McLean Davies, Doecke, and Mead 2013). In VCE English, open-ended modes of literary exploration or emotional experience are often deemed too ‘woolly’ (McKnight 2016) and creative writing that is process driven too ‘airy fairy’ (Frawley 2014) and reading and writing are refigured into units of work, with standardised outcomes and rigid assessments. Within this system, certain civilised (Ahmed 2004–2014) or entrepreneurial (Calder-Dawe et al. 2021) feelings and dispositions are welcomed and promoted. Confidence, resilience (Dadvand, Cahill, and Zembylas 2022) and empathy (Pedwell 2016) are fostered because they have utility and market value (O’Grady 2020).

Senior English teachers grapple with pervasive and formidable neoliberal forces as they seek to balance altruistic or social justice intentions with the need to conform to the system and foster productive affects. After their discussion of cultivating empathy for the suffering Trojan women, the Year 12 teacher further justified this decision in terms of elevating achievement:

Empathy is a better emotion because you can see both sides. It’s not so much about, you know, I think you’re great or you’re not, it’s that I see where you’re at, I see your experiences, and I can understand where you’re coming from. And I think that’ll give more depth to their analysis.

Empathy is activated because it has utility and value in this economy – it can be wielded by students to improve the work of their text response and activated by the teacher to lift their status by improving class results. This hollow animation of empathy does not exemplify the kind of ‘critical, compassionate and ethical relationality’ (Dadvand, Cahill, and Zembylas 2022, 289) of an authentic empathetic practice. Indeed, student survey responses from this Year 12 class did not contain the same degree of emotional depth or self-reflexivity as the above-quoted Year 11 group. Feelings about the experience of the text focused on learning activities that were perceived to be ‘helpful’, and feelings about the assessment task controlled the ways in which the text was experienced emotionally:

It was like when we had previously done text analysis, although I really enjoyed the increased level of class discussion.

This may be due to the differing invitations and provocations of the texts, the students as individuals and as readers, and/or due to the influence of the more acute neoliberal pressures of Year 12 final assessments and grades.

Discussion

Empathy was manifest throughout the fibres of VCE English classrooms as an a effect of pedagogy and the text–reader interface. It was singled out as a feeling and relation deemed important for student growth and social justice, whilst also being animated for its potential to improve essays. Interestingly, it was found that empathy seemed to exceed or challenge pedagogical mediation. The Year 12 teacher, who sought to actively position their students as empathisers towards suffering characters in The Women of Troy, was not able to overcome the force of the assessment which ultimately shaped some students’ emotional response to the text. In contrast, the Year 11 students, whose teacher espoused an intention to focus on skills and redirect emotional or personal responses, articulated feelings of discomfort and empathy in their discussions of the texts. Through representations of difficult knowledge, these particular set literary texts offered an invitation to empathise rooted in discomfort. In the unique transaction between readers and their texts, some students accepted this invitation to empathise, or began to move towards a kind of self-reflexive and critical empathy. These discrepancies between teacher intentions and the student experience of texts points to the fundamentally unpredictable and diverse nature of empathy and empathising, as well as the affective potentials of difficult knowledge texts to disrupt the (perceived) restrictive bounds of the senior English curriculum.

It was also found that when empathy emerged in student responses through pedagogical invocations or the text–reader interface, it was in a scripted, refined or civilised manner, closely attached to feeling bad or feeling sorry, to quiet contemplation and notions of self-improvement. This illuminates aspects of the emotion norms in these classroom contexts (Boler 1999) and, more importantly, foundational entanglements between empathy and the interpellation of the civilised student-subject of English. In other words, the virtuous (Boler 1999) student of English empathises with characters ‘as a sig[n] of cultivation’ (Ahmed 2004–2014, 3) and is likely rewarded for this, genuine or ingenuine, display. This cycle of expectation and performance may make notions of authentic empathetic feelings and relations increasingly opaque, particularly in high stakes contexts.

Conclusion

Even when motivated by pure altruism, empathy alone cannot be reparative or transformative. ‘Empathy cannot easily, or necessarily ever’ Pedwell (2014) explains, ‘heal words of “the past”, not only because they run so deep, but also because the past isn’t even past’ (115). The enduring social injustices represented in literature will not be mended by student empathy. But it could be a seed for healing and social change. As emotions become the ‘social and political resources that shape the ways through which students respond to social injustice’ (Zembylas 2018, 98), there is a need to think critically about how emotions are mediated in the pedagogical space; in this case, to challenge norms that see empathy invoked for the purposes of improved essays or to benefit the empathiser, rather than the lives or realities that would be empathised with. What would it mean to disrupt the ‘feeling good about being good’ (Lobb 2022, 90) performative/passive circuit of the morally good empathiser in senior English? What might an ‘affective rupture’ (Dadvant, Cahill and Zembylas 2022, 287) of empathy done differently look like?

An unruly empathy is one that is uncomfortable, wilful and disruptive – it unfurls from, and sits with, the unproductive feelings occluded or policed in traditional senior English classrooms: pain, shame, resentment, confusion, anxiety. An unruly empathy embraces and acknowledges the difficulties of discomfort and dissonance within rigid curricula and high-stakes assessments and moves away from remediating empathy into something self-serving, performative or toothless. There is a need for further research that explores the potentials of empathy done differently – allowed to become unruly – and how it might interplay with the actors and agencies of high-stakes English classrooms to become more socially transformative and reparative.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and express my appreciation to the teachers and students who welcomed me into their classrooms and generously participated in data collection activities.

I would also like to thank Larissa McLean Davies and Sarah Truman for their guidance in the drafting of this piece.

Finally, I am grateful to both reviewers for taking the time to read and comment on my paper.

Disclosure statement

The author discloses that they were working as an English teacher at the school where the ethnography was conducted at the time of the data collection.

Additional information

Funding

Allayne Horton was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Stipend and RTP Fee-Offset Scholarship through the University of Melbourne. Open Access funding enabled and organised by CAUL and its Member Institutions.

Notes on contributors

Allayne Horton

Allayne Horton is a PhD Candidate and secondary English teacher. Her research is informed by theories of affect and feminist new materialisms and focuses on literary pedagogy and text selection with close attention to the classroom interface.

Notes

1. There is perhaps more space for student agency in text selection in the latest iteration of the VCE English and English as an Additional Language Study Design (2023–2027) with the inclusion of mentor texts that can be selected ‘in consultation […] with students […] to create meaningful and authentic connections with the[ir] experiences’ (VCAA 2023a, 15). Although, I would argue that when these texts become entangled with high-stakes assessments, the telically driven approach to the literary encounter remains largely the same.

2. Although the latest iteration of the Study Design also includes ‘a personal response to a set text’ as a key task (VCAA 2023a, 16), ‘analytical writing about a text’ and ‘critically engag[ing] with a text’ (17) remain central practices enshrined in the outcomes students must meet to pass the subject.