Drawing from a larger study of teacher empathy, this article offers a critical race analysis of three teachers' "dispositions" to discern (a) their social and emotional competencies (SEC) and (b) evidence of "transformative" social and emotional learning (SEL). Data sources include one-on-one teacher interviews, focus groups,…

Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) offers elaborate empirical and theoretical conventions for becoming an effective teacher of diverse youth. Empathy has been found to improve classroom teachers' capacity to (re)act or respond to youth in ways that produce evidence of CRP. However, there are too few instructive models in teacher education that…

The concept "False Empathy" posited by critical race theory luminary Richard Delgado ("Calif Law Rev" 84(1):61-100, 1996) easily obscures White teacher's good intentions to be effective educators of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. It is argued here that critical race theory is useful for isolating and…

Empathy is theorized to improve the teaching effectiveness of teachers in urban and multicultural classroom settings. However, the field has few models useful for training and preparing teachers to cultivate empathy as a professional disposition. This study examines the academic, behavioral, and social/relational interactions of four White female…

The flagrant failure of education institutions across the P-20 pipeline to adequately respond to the intellectual, emotional, and social needs of Black males is well-documented in the education research literature. Alternatively, empathy is theorized to improve the education practitioner's professional interactions with students of color. This…

The quality of student-teacher interactions is shaped by both the capacity of the teacher to cultivate trusting relationships with students and his or her ability to establish a safe, supportive classroom environment. This proves especially important for individuals teaching in multicultural and urban education settings. In recent literature,…

Empathy is theorized to help teachers build strategic student--teacher relationships, develop productive parent partnerships, and acquire professionally informed social and cultural perspectives of students and families. However, this literature offers little empirical evidence regarding how practicing teachers conceive of and enact empathy in…

Teachers aiming to become culturally responsive must be concerned with negotiating professional interactions that produce favorable outcomes for the culturally diverse students under their charge. Very few studies offer empirical evidence of empathy's utility in the culturally responsive classroom, especially when the teacher is culturally…