What is the Point of Empathy? A Call for <i>Critical Empathy</i> in Noticing Emotions for Equity in Response to Patterson Williams and Sheth

ABSTRACT As part of the special issue, Centering Affect and Emotion Toward Justice and Dignity in Science Education, this commentary responds to Alexis Patterson Williams and Manali Sheth's paper, “Cultivating Inner Witnesses Attuned to the Emotional Experiences of Students of Color in Science.” We articulate critical empathy as an emergent set of concrete practices for researchers, teachers, and others to consider, grounded in a deep curiosity about our own and others' emotional experiences and in a steadfast commitment to collective action toward more just and humanizing science education. We offer several suggestions for enacting critical empathy in work on noticing emotions in science education: (1) Reflect on one's own emotions and positionality; (2) Attend to students' and teachers' emotions; (3) Build on emotions as incitements to redress inequities at interpersonal and systemic levels; (4) Illuminate and disrupt dehumanizing emotional rules and politics of affect; and (5) Resist the reduction of emotions and the noticing of emotions to measurable quantities and “best practices,” and instead work to support messy learning in all its complexity. We argue that attuning to the emotions of students of color in humanizing ways requires not only addressing individual teachers' knowledge, skills, and dispositions but also systemic changes to teacher education, science education, and schooling more broadly.