Author: Andrew Appleton Pine

Engaging in social justice work is often explained as heart or love work because of the connection to compassion and empathy. This is no less true in our writing classrooms. I teach and am the writing program administrator at a small, midwest HBCU. Using empathy in my own writing classrooms has afforded me the opportunity to engage with students in a way which helps to break down barriers and promote equality. As Kevin M. Gannon writes in Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, “An approach that embraces empathy and compassion as its default orientation is foundational to a pedagogy of radical…