READING FOR EMPATHY, REFLECTING FOR AWARENESS: A PILOT STUDY FOR IMPROVING SELF AND OTHER AWARENESS THROUGH WRITING A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE TEXAS WOMAN’S UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, SPEECH, AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BY RACHAEL GRAY REYNOLDS B.A., M.A. DENTON, TEXAS MAY 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Rachael Gray Reynolds DEDICATION To my wife and daughter. For your patience, love, inspiration, and silliness. This may not change the world, but I hope it helps our understanding of it a bit better. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I want to thank my committee members: Dr. Gretchen Busl, Dr. Dundee Lackey, and Dr. Genevieve West. I appreciate all of your thoughtful comments, recommendations, and the discussions we have had throughout the dissertation process, as well as all of those that came before it. Without your brilliance, support, and patience, I do not know that this would have ever made it off the ground, much less become a completed project. I would like to extend a huge thank you to my fellow Graduate Teaching Assistants in the First-Year Composition program for allowing me to visit your classrooms for recruitment, as well as all of the encouragement throughout the process. I am also grateful to all of those who participated in the study and trusted me to get them through a semester long research project without taking too much time away from their own personal educational goals. It was definitely a huge learning process for me; I hope it was a positive learning one for all those involved. I also want to thank my friends and family for all of their sacrifices, understanding, and occasional tough love that helped encourage and motivate me as I worked towards the completion of this degree and project. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Tori. Without her support, flexibility, understanding, and insight, I do not know that I would have had the passion or desire to see this project through to the end. I know I would not have had the opportunity to take the rhetoric to such a place of emotion, awareness, and understanding without all of our iii discussions and debates. Thank you for believing in me, putting up with me, and everything you juggled and sacrificed throughout my classwork, comprehensive exams, and dissertation process. iv ABSTRACT RACHAEL GRAY REYNOLDS READING FOR EMPATHY, REFLECTION FOR AWARENESS: A CASE STUDY FOR IMPROVING SELF AND OTHER AWARENESS THROUGH WRITING MAY 2018 The recent popularity of the term empathy has generated much discussion about how to gain empathetic awareness of the world around us. Within the context of composition studies, this relates specifically to writers’ audience awareness: a successful student writer should have an awareness and understanding of who they are as an individual, as well as an awareness and understanding of who their audience is. The primary purpose of this study was to develop a way to talk about such empathetic awareness in writing, in order to suggest a means for producing more audience-aware writing in the composition classroom. A total of 22 participants, nine participants for the control group and 13 participants for the test group, completed three stages of this mixed- methods research study: 1) a written pre-reflection assessed for empathy and a Defining Issues Test (DIT) that assessed for moral judgment; 2) the reading of four short stories, with the test group completing a guided reflection for each story; and 3) a repetition of the assessments from the first stage. The data collected from all three stages (1) confirmed that reading literary fiction increases empathetic awareness, (2) revealed that writing guided reflection about the reading leads to a further increase in empathetic awareness, and (3) prompted the definition of two separate forms of empathy known as v “external empathy,” or empathetic awareness of the other, and “internal empathy,” or empathetic awareness of the self. These results indicated that adding reflection to the practice of reading increases the amount empathy performed in writing. This suggests that future research should explore how to incorporate this type of empathy performance in composition writing in order to gain better audience- and self-awareness in writing. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................. iii ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................v LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. x LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xi Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................1 Personal Experience .......................................................................................................2 Teaching Experience ......................................................................................................4 General Conversation .....................................................................................................6 Dissertation Road Map ................................................................................................17 II. DISCUSSION OF TERMINOLOGY AND CONCEPTS ............................................19 Empathy .......................................................................................................................19 Theory of Mind and Transportation Theory ................................................................43 Reflection .....................................................................................................................50 Conclusion of Discussion of Terminology and Concepts ............................................52 III. METHODOLOGY .....................................................................................................55 Part I: Definition of Terms ...........................................................................................55 Part II: Design and Background of Study ....................................................................56 Part III: Launching Study.............................................................................................63 Part IV: Participants .....................................................................................................67 Part V: Explanation of Methodology ...........................................................................68 IV. RESULTS ....................................................................................................................78 Pre- and Post-Reflection Question Responses .............................................................79 vii Control Group: Reading .........................................................................................79 Control Group: Writing..........................................................................................83 Test Group: Reading ..............................................................................................84 Test Group: Writing ...............................................................................................87 Discussion of Control and Test Group Question Responses .................................90 Pre- and Post-Reflection Responses for External Empathy .........................................92 Control Group ..........................................................................................................92 Test Group ...............................................................................................................93 Discussion of Control and Test Group for External Empathy ................................96 Pre- and Post-Reflection Responses for Internal Empathy ..........................................97 Control Group ........................................................................................................97 Test Group .............................................................................................................99 Discussion of Control and Test Group for Internal Empathy ..............................102 Short Story Reflection Responses for Intentionality, ToM, and Self-Awareness .....104 “Cathedral” .........................................................................................................104 “Sweat” ...............................................................................................................105 “Desiree’s Baby” ................................................................................................106 “Brownies” .........................................................................................................107 Discussion of Results from Short Story Reflection on Intentionality, ToM, and Self-Awareness ............................................................................................108 Short Story Reflection Responses for External Empathy ..........................................110 Discussion about External Empathy in Short Story Reflections ........................118 Short Story Reflection Responses for Internal Empathy