Examining Empathy: Amplifying the Voice of Youth Researchers

Presentation (Faculty180)

cited authors

  • Sloane, Heather M

description

  • <p>Conference was cancelled due to COVID The Fearless Writers (FW) program was started four years ago as a way to bring inner city high school students together with students involved in interprofesssional education (medicine, nursing, social work, pharmacy, PT, OT, etc.). The FW program encourages creative writing that disrupts stereotypes and myths caused in part by discriminatory policies encouraging social separation in the United States. The lack of economic and racial diversity in US neighborhoods supports the creation of implicit bias, which are unconscious preferences and attitudes towards difference. Implicit bias, in turn, contributes to health disparities. Students involved in FW learn how the sharing of creative writing, models empathy. This paper explores the use of collaborative autoethnography method with youth researchers and how the sharing of written lived experience has deepened the groups understanding of the cost of social separation and has broadened participant understanding of empathy. Through creative writing, the group has learned to use words to show their lived reality through sensory description. It is the mutual self-disclosure in the group process that creates a common ground for understanding. The youth of FW involved in research, are encouraged to use their voice to invite empathy and to provoke social justice action. In the four years of this program students have chosen to explore a variety of issues: social separation, youth gun violence, stereotypes, and hate crimes. Youth have an important voice in the community that is often silenced. Sharing the research process and the research audience with young people has amplified their collective concern about injustice and their unique vantage point for inquiry. The FW program is an example of collaboration between the university community and the surrounding community and is a model of how social work can apply qualitative method as a social justice intervention.</p>

authors

publication date

  • 2020

presented at event