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<p>  </p> <p>Empathy is a complex emotional response to others’ experiences that can both advance and obstruct mutual understanding. Many fields in the humanities and social sciences have their own theories of empathy, including recent advances in rhetoric and composition. However, writing center studies have not yet arrived at a theory of empathy despite a body of scholarship that invokes empathy as a necessary skill or disposition in writing center praxis. This dissertation argues that empathic dispositions can be evoked and tempered in staff education classrooms through assignments that facilitate critical self-reflection on one’s positionality. The present pilot study describes four aspects of empathic dispositions that can be tempered in a writing center curriculum. The first chapter categorizes different concepts of empathy in writing centers and theorizes four aspects of empathic dispositions that align with theories on rhetoric, affect, and feminist approaches to empathic, critical engagement with others. The second chapter outlines the feminist methodologies and methods that were used to collect and analyze interviews with research participants. The third chapter describes a sixteen-week staff education course that was oriented to evoking and developing students’ empathic dispositions. The fourth chapter shares interviews with new consultants who reflect on their first semester in our writing center and how their work was influenced by their assignments and experiences in our curriculum. The final chapter concludes the study by outlining its limitations, charting a path forward for future research, and offering a pedagogical approach to cultivating empathic dispositions that I call resonant reflection. The results of this study indicate that consultants draw from their own experiences and values when they imagine a writer’s circumstances. They can access their rich, yet tacit, experiences through deliberative reflection, a necessary component of developing empathic dispositions that advance mutual understanding. These findings implicate that a stronger theoretical framework for empathy in writing centers can advance not only writing center research and pedagogy but also our commitments to social justice in our centers. </p>

In this essay, I endeavour to broaden the concept of literature by introducing five children’s literary works. Primarily, literary scholars have concentrated their studies on literature written by adults, regarding children as readers rather than writers. I believe that such a concept fails to cover the diversity of the literary field and therefore needs to change. Approaching writing and reading from a sociocultural point of view, and reading children’s stories from a narratological perspective, I intend to show that a new concept of literature is not only possible but inevitable. Due to the dialectic relationship between sender and receiver, literary and linguistic conventions and deviations, the definition of literature is renegotiated continuously. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu emphasized the impact of the academy by illustrating that scholars are maintaining literary norms when putting titles on reading lists and acknowledging certain authorships. Writing this essay is thus a pledge of change. Adult research of children’s literary work encompasses a wide range of implicit age-related power issues (aetonormativity), according to the Swedish literary scholar, Maria Nikolajeva. In this essay, I show an insufficiency of some of these adult literary concepts when applied to children’s writing. I conclude that a partly new terminology, based on children’s writing, needs to co-exist with the older set of concepts. I also emphasize the need for further literary studies on children’s writing to question, criticize and complete mine, and to acknowledge the variety of literary aspects in children’s writing.

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