Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons^™

The Power Of Empathy: A Critical Narrative Inquiry Of Cultural Competencies In New Teachers, Marcus K. Hughes, Sr.

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

Given the large homogeneous workforce of predominately White, middle-class female K–12 educators combined with the rising population of diverse students in the United States and the disproportionate achievement gap of students of color compared to their White peers, I sought to discover how new millennial educators defined and used empathy to build their own cultural competencies as well as discover how these teachers used empathy to strengthen the teacherstudent relationships across cultural differences. Using the conceptual frameworks of Paulo Freire’s (1970) pedagogy and Wang et al.’s (2003) definition of ethno-cultural empathy, I conducted a critical narrative inquiry of five first-year …