Avoiding Empathy Fatigue:
What CNF Educators Can Learn from an Oncologist
Becky Blake and Matthew J. Butler
11.1
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At the end of last semester, I (Becky) was feeling emotionally fatigued. A significant portion of the student assignments from my two creative nonfiction classes were, as they often are, essays exploring a difficult personal story, such as an experience of death, illness, or abuse. These assignments felt less moving to me than usual, as though their poignancy was being diluted by the many similar essays I’ve read over the past decade. Feeling guilty about my failure to fully connect with the personal stories I’d been entrusted with, I was working very slowly.
Emotional fatigue is common in “high-touch” professions such as teaching, coaching, and healthcare. My husband (Matthew) happens to be an oncologist, and he encounters situations requiring empathy on a daily basis. It occurred to me that he might have developed some strategies that could be relevant to my own work, so I decided to ask him. Together, we’ve tried to recapture our conversation below. Click here to continue reading. |
Essayism in the Age of AI
Kelly Myers and Bruce Ballenger
11.2
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In 2022, when Generative AI burst onto the scene, writing instructors sounded the alarm. Some predicted that the technology would put an end to the academic essay. Others worried about an epidemic of cheating, and struggled to redesign writing assignments. In desperation, some colleges even tried to ban Generative AI altogether. The rest struggled to craft policies to guard against plagiarism.
It was at this historical moment that we began work on the 10th edition of The Curious Researcher, a textbook that focuses on research-based writing. At first, we shared our colleagues’ panic: how would we write a book about research-based writing during a moment when the very nature of research and writing–even fact–felt in flux? As we were working on the book, we met every Friday at a little cafe near the Boise State campus, and we always sat at the same table by the door. The setting remained the same, but each week it was like we were living in a new world. Whatever grounding we had in our understanding of authorship was suddenly unsettled and we had to find our footing. Click here to continue reading. |
Exquisite Copse
Marco Wilkinson
11.2
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Back in the classroom today, I have often wondered, especially in this moment where whatever golden hour we might have had to alter our environmental circumstances seems to be rapidly fading to darkness, how to draw my students through the journey of ecological insight described above so that in their early twenties they might carry forward some sense of the world I am only now finding words for in my forties. In a time when all of us feel the pull into a digital world, how might I guide my students into the woods: to see them perhaps for the first time as a “thing” to marvel at and love, to trace in them the lines of relationship and flow that shift “nature” to “ecology,” and to recognize that the lives they’ve been living all this time have always been lived in/with/through the woods, all together? The following is an exercise I have developed as a potential answer.
This is a three-part exercise I have used with students in a variety of contexts, ranging from an environmental literature seminar to an ecopoetics creative writing workshop to a sustainable agriculture class. Sometimes I have run all three rounds of this exercise in one class meeting and at other times I have spaced them out so each round takes up the whole meeting. Each space brings with it slightly different learning objectives and elicits different discussions at each stage of the exercise, but creative writing, literature, and science students have all found it useful. Click here to continue reading. |