Month: May 2022

A fellow researcher, from Envision Kindness, where I found most of these beautiful photos, reached out recently about my 20+-year-old dissertation research on compassion. My research showed that in less than 40 seconds a doctor could, through direct words and actions, clearly display compassion AND reduce others’ anxiety (Fogarty et al, 1999). It was that simple. This got me thinking about the simple power of compassion I’ve seen in my work since then, and on the wellbeing of young people.

Compassion Defined

First, what do we mean by compassion? It’s not the same as empathy, which is our awareness of others’ emotions, trying to understand how others feel. Compassion is an emotional response to that empathy and a desire to act. To help. (Goetz, Keltner & Simon-Thomas, 2010)

Plenty of research shows the power of compassion (Avmaramchuk et al, 2013; Hoskins & Liu, 2019). Many studies also illustrate that compassion can be learned (e.g., Kohler-Evans & Dowd Barns 2015; Sinclair et al, 2021) but must be practiced (Hariman, 2009;  Jazaieri, 2018). I’ll share a few stories from my work as a researcher.

The Power of Compassion

Compassion cycles. In a small suburb outside Nairobi, Kenya, I interviewed one young man for a health project. We were trying to learn the best ways to provide health services to high-risk youth. So, we asked them. I got the sense that no one had ever asked this young man his opinion. As he gradually realized my questions were rooted in wanting to understand his needs so we could respond with appropriate services, he went from confused, to shy, to understanding, and helping. He provided insights about where to locate services, who should provide them and what times of day. He offered to find others to talk to. It was a kind of compassionate cycle—as if my small display of interest and compassion inspired empathy and action on his part.

Compassion as advocacy. In a rural town about two hours from Islamabad, Pakistan, I was part of a panel discussing findings — partly in English, partly in Urdu — from a post-partum family planning project that had just ended. I don’t speak Urdu, but when the three young women who received project services spoke, I saw many in the audience cry. Later I learned the women had described multiple difficult births, seeing friends die in childbirth, and the fear they were left with. They described how family planning brought them hope that their bodies could remain strong and they could provide the best care for their families. The audience felt both the women’s fear and hope and were moved to action. Local district health officials committed to continue the services using their own health budget now that our project was over.

Compassion as connection. In a study of care for dementia patients in Maryland, USA, I interviewed one young woman whose mother was in the final stages of the disease. The mother’s personality had changed completely, and she only occasionally remembered the daughter whom she had talked to nearly daily until recently. Surely the daughter missed the relationship she once had with the woman she knew as her mother. But that’s not what the daughter talked about. Instead, she shared the joy of getting to know the woman in front of her, discovering what NOW made the mother happy, like pink butterfly hair clips. She worked to understand her mother anew and do what she could to make her mother happy. Her compassion took my breath away.

We each have precious stories of beautiful acts of kindness and staggering inhumanity. I hold both types of memories close. Together they make me human.

Learning Compassion

Now I work in the positive youth development (PYD) field at the International Youth Foundation. We are committed to the success of young adults and engage them to help identify solutions and guide project design. We emphasize life skills, such as interpersonal skills (teamwork and conflict management) and community mindset (including empathy and cultural understanding). Many of the lessons build on an awareness of others’ emotions and a desire to act: Compassion.

Life skills training in the classroom. Schools we work with in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East value and invest in life skills, including empathy and compassion, and they are seeing the effects on young people’s wellbeing. For example, young trainees in Zimbabwe had increased subjective wellbeing in resilience, economic empowerment, and quality of relationships. Learners in South Africa scored higher in responsibility, problem-solving, goal setting, and desire to lead. First year high school students in Chihuahua, Mexico, with life skills training had lower drop-out rates and higher Grade Point Averages than other students.

Not surprisingly the in-person program affects not only students, but also teachers, many of whom are new to the ideas and the participatory methods they now incorporate. In an evaluation of our life skills curriculum — Passport to Success© — in Tanzania and Mozambique, teachers  saw a mindset shift in themselves after teaching life skills. They reported valuing and using life skills in and out of the classroom. Most importantly, they reported prioritizing student success beyond graduation over enrollment and course completion, seeing their role as connecting youth to their future goals rather than simply imparting skills.

Compassion Takes Practice

While writing this blog, I unexpectedly found a powerful TEDx Talk from June 5, 2018 called “How 40 seconds of compassion could save a life.” The speaker, Stephen Trzeciak, a physician specializing in intensive care, listed the research evidence on compassion and its benefits for patients as well as providers. Knowing the research well, he turned to our 1999 “40 seconds of compassion” paper when he faced his own work crisis. Rather than treat his burnout by escaping — the recommended therapy — he hoped to heal by reestablishing personal connections. He diligently added moments of intentional compassion into each patient interaction, practicing compassion until he felt it return to his life. In his words: “I connected more, not less. Cared more, not less. I leaned in rather than pulling back. That’s when the fog of burnout began to lift. My 40 seconds of compassion changed everything for me.”

I’m left with this simple reflection: Compassion. Is. Powerful. Understanding it more, teaching it more, practicing it more could change everything.

References

Avramchuk, A.S., Manning, M.R. & Carpino, R.A. (2013). Compassion for a change: A review of research and theory”, Research in Organizational Change and Development, Vol. 21, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley, 201-232. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0897-3016(2013)0000021010

Fogarty, L.A., Curbow, B.A., Wingard, J.R., McDonnell, K., & Somerfield, M.R. (1999). Can 40-seconds of compassion reduce patient anxiety? Journal of Clinical Oncology, 17(1), 371-379.

Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: an evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351–374. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018807

Hariman, R. (2009). Cultivating Compassion as a Way of Seeing. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6(2), 199-203.

Hoskins, B., & Liu, L. (2019) Measuring life skills in the context of Life Skills and Citizenship Education the Middle East and North Africa: United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank. https://www.unicef.org/mena/media/7011/file/Measuring%20life%20skills_web.pdf.pdf

Jazaieri, H. (2018). Compassionate education from preschool to graduate school: Bringing a culture of compassion into the classroom. Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching & Learning, 11(1), 22-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIT-08-2017-0017

Kohler-Evans, P., & Dowd Barns, C. (2015). Compassion: How do you teach it? Journal of Education and Practice, 6(11). www.iiste.org ISSN 2222-1735 (Paper) ISSN 2222-288X (Online)

It is well documented that education is a human right and a necessity in modern societies, especially in emergencies and post-conflict relief situations. It is also known that transformation can happen through authentic, learner-centered, and quality education, hence making education an important tool for change.  A major report by UNESCO (Delores, et al.1996) articulates well the role education plays in human development and identifies four critical components or pillars of learning for future generations that are worth sharing and exploring in this blog series. The four components are: learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together, and learning to be. This blog post reviews them and provides further thinking on examples in religious education contexts.

As an educator myself and someone who has accumulated experiences and learned lessons from working in conflict areas, I have witnessed the importance of all these pillars of learning to achieve and enable individuals as well as groups to change their lives. Transformation must involve creativity in pedagogy and curriculum along with addressing learners’ rights, starting with providing safe spaces for teachers and students to develop, make mistakes, and gain confidence. Unfortunately, the four pillars, representing a more comprehensive approach to transformation, are not always adopted, and acknowledged in schools and in higher education. This approach challenges change efforts because when only learning to know and do are prevalent, education does not fulfill its role of improving society, especially in countries with limited resources. As Schliecher (2019) suggests, the future of education is in combining knowledge and technological skills together with socio-emotional skills and values for humans to grow and develop. This is of great importance today especially since government emphasis on academic scores and rankings is losing the battle on socio-emotional learning and the values needed to improve youth and their lives (Kearns, 2010).

The learning to know component is very much focused on the transfer of knowledge and information; the educator is at the center of the learning process and holds all the power over information and its delivery, with the learners being passive recipients. This is the most common form of education where teachers provide new information to students which they are supposed to assimilate or accommodate into their existing collection of information, what Piaget calls schemas (Mooney, 2013). This knowledge ranges from basic reading, writing, mathematics, science, and memorization of the holy Quran and prophetic traditions in the case of religious education. In today’s realities of globalization and interrelatedness, learning to know is not sufficient by itself to prepare the next generations of leaders and citizens of the world as the information is available and accessible to anybody who would like to know more. Having the skills to identify, analyze, synthesize, and create knowledge is needed today more than the basic skill of learning to know.  

The learning to do pillar is more about competencies and behaviors but also about technical skills and the abilities related to the physical environment and how we interact with it. For young children, it’s the ability to tie shoes, open a book, ride a bike, and put a puzzle together. It is also about having digital intelligence and learning to navigate the social media platforms and online world safely (https://powerof0.org/lifeskills/) or getting from one point to another using public transportation, a bike, or a map. In Islamic religious education, it entails learning how to pray, clean oneself, and finding the qibla (the direction towards the Kaaba when praying). The first two pillars work together to seek knowledge, navigate, and do. Although in the learning to do component there is a call for independence and mastery of life skills, online platforms today are flooded with trouble-shooting instructions on doing everything one can think of, like the information overload for learning to know.

Learning to live together requires a collective approach where government officials, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and religious leaders spread the message about living with the other, starting with differences in the immediate local community. Recently, there is more emphasis on the learning to live together pillar of education through curriculum materials and global players who have been collaborating to promote the approach. One international example is the work of the Ethics Education for Children curriculum that has been translated into many languages and is in partnership with UNICEF and UNESCO as well as other international organizations (https://ethicseducationforchildren.org/en/what-we-do/learning-to-live-together). In religious education, there are also available resources by Muslim scholars to support the learning to live together. For instance, the works of El-Moslimany (2018) and Qurtuby (2013) speak about the inclusion of the whole world and all humans when thinking about the “Oneness of God” (Tawheed). 

The fourth pillar, learning to be, goes beyond all three and includes the spiritual learning where one needs to feel safe to explore their state of mind in relation to self and others. The learning to be requires all three previous pillars to work together including the cognitive, social, and emotional skills along with values of individuals and groups to seek higher virtues to live by (Nasser, et. Al. 2019). These may be inspired by human as well as revealed knowledge of the holy Quran, the Sunna, and religious teaching. In addition, this pillar cannot be forced but needs to become a natural step evolving from and along the other pillars.

The first two pillars of education are more prevalent than the last two because educators have easier access to resources and ways to achieve learning objectives and there is more familiarity with them. The resources on knowledge and ways to teach skills are also available to teachers who are in the formal system and in non-formal settings of education. The learning to live together and the learning to be components are at an advanced level of learning (see below Bloom’s taxonomy and its hierarchical learning model described in Armstrong, 2010). They require further engagement of educators and students alike in terms of analysis, evaluation, and creating new knowledge (Armstrong, 2010). As mentioned, they entail a wider involvement of the immediate communities and stakeholders to model and reinforce the types of behaviors, values, and principles that strengthen the ability to live together, to be which also requires personal development, and to aspire towards higher states of consciousness (Nasser, et.al. 2021). Both pillars, in fact, aim at promoting a healthy and inclusive human development, especially elevating the spiritual and psychosocial aspects of learning. As such, in education settings, whether formal or informal, there is a need for a more intentional approach and emphasis on these two pillars.

To expand on the learning to be pillar and explore it further, situating it within the empirical and field-based scholarship, this blog series focuses on learners in PK-12 and higher education, especially in Muslim communities, to discuss the aspects of growth relevant in promoting learning to be. It shares recent studies examining youth wellbeing, sense of belonging, ethics, curriculum, needs of students in schools and universities, as well as how teachers respond to the pedagogical requisites of students. Our Mapping the Terrain empirical study on Muslim youth, educators, and parents in Muslim societies highlighted the critical need to explore the learning to be as a critical state of learning and its manifestations in self-development, values, and competencies among participants in 15 Muslim countries. We hope to extend the conversation and explore other models of educational transformation with this blog series. Enjoy!

References

Armstrong, P. (2010). Bloom’s Taxonomy. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/.

Delors, J., Al Mufti, I., Amagi, I., Carneiro, R., Chung, F., Geremek, B., Gorham,W., Kornhauser, A., Manley, M., Padrón Quero, M., Savane, M. A., Singh, K., Stavenhagen, R., Suhr, M. W., & Nanzhao, Z. (1996). Learning: The treasure within. UNESCO.

El-Moslimany, A. (2018). Teaching children: A moral, spiritual, and holistic approach to educational development. International Institute of Islamic Thought.

Kearns, L. (2010). High stakes standardized testing and marginalized youth: An examination of the impact on those who fail. Canadian Journal of Education, 34(2), 112–130.

Mooney, C. G. (2013). Theories of childhood: An Introduction to Dewey, Montessori, Erikson, Piaget & Vygotsky (Rev. ed.). Redleaf Press Publisher.

Nasser, I., Cheema, J., & Saroughi, M. (2019). Advancing education in Muslim societies: Mapping the terrain report 2018–2019. International Institute of Islamic Thought. http://doi.org/10.47816/mtt.2018.2019

Nasser, I. Saroughi, M. Shelby, L. (2021). Advancing education in Muslim societies: Mapping the terrain report 2019–2020. International Institute of Islamic Thought. http://doi.org/10.47816/mtt.2019-2020-march2021

Schleicher, A. (2019). Helping our youngest to learn and grow: Policies for early learning. International Summit on the Teaching Profession. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264313873-en

Qurtuby, S. A. (2013). The Islamic roots of liberation, justice and peace: An anthropocentric analysis of the concept of “Tawhīd.” Islamic Studies, 52, 297–325.