RAVE-O and Empathy

The E in the new RAVE-O is for EMPATHY, as well as Engagement and Effort. 

The E in the original RAVE-O represented the importance of Engagement for our students (AND those who teach them!). To be sure,  a major goal for every version of RAVE-O will be to engage the student’s imagination as an on-ramp to their learning what can often be difficult without their motivation.  Not only does the engagement of their imagination help them learn, it fuels their confidence in their ability to read and their desire to read more---well beyond the lessons of the day. 

As a former teacher of struggling readers and a mother of a son with dyslexia, I want every student to know that we will do whatever it takes to help them become their best selves. In RAVE-O Town the characters there stand for a panoply ofl inguistic and metacognitive strategies that we want the children to learn, from Mayor MIC and his many semantic connections, to grammatical characters like Nina Noun and Victor Verb.  Make no mistake. These character  are not just semantic and syntactic strategies, they are engagement strategies. It is easier to remember what a verb does by seeing the antics of Victor Verb than hearing a definition.

This brings me to  the new E’s in the revised RAVE-O: Empathy, Effort, and Endurance.   Empathy may well be one of the most important contributions of reading in today’s world. Yet it is a too little discussed dimension of what I call Deep Reading (see Reading Nest essay on Deep Reading and Deep Thinking). I have learned from one of the most beautiful minds I have ever encountered, narrative theologian John S. Dunne, CSC, that when we read we have a bridge from which we “pass over” into the lives, thoughts, and feelings of others. The act of ‘passing over’ is twice blessed: first, it brings to life the existence of ‘others’ whom we would never otherwise know or care about. 

Second, after we pass over, we pass back to ourselves enriched for the knowledge we have gained. As the modules of RAVE-O progress from basic levels to more advanced, the Minute Stories and chapter books give as many opportunities as possible to enter into the lives of the characters. The two series, Meg and Lil and Frog and Dog, were specially written to convey what it feels like to be different and to be sad and to be helpful.  Meg personifies the struggles of readers who can’t learn to read and feel depressed at every failure. Lil personifies the struggles of someone who lives in a wheel chair but  who has much to give others through her gifts in reading and writing.   The characters throughout RAVE-O have been written to help every reader realize that what may seem problematic  in their differences can be a help to others. In Frog and Dog,  Frog’s little body is just what Dog needs to find things in a log. Dog’s big body is just what Frog needs to get places faster.  It is a major goal in RAVE-O to help every reader learn to pass over into the thoughts and feelings of others.

The third E in RAVE-O is Effort and its invaluable contribution to learning. We hope to instill something psychologist Carol Dweck described long ago, “Growth mindset”, the belief that our success in learning is based on our efforts and desire to learn, not some fixed notion of our intelligence. Many a student with dyslexia or other reading struggles believes they are not intelligent enough to read like everyone else.  In RAVE-O we emphasize the power of Effort over time! One of the least sung aspects of Effort is persistence. We have created an endearing, unlikely heroine of persistence: Sammy the Slug who never gives up. Not unlike the ancient myth of the Tortoise and the Hare, Sammy just keeps going. We want out students to learn that the other side of Effort is  the fourth E-Endurance. We are here for the Long Game in RAVE-O, and we don’t give up.

I want to come back to the importance of Empathy in our world today. There is another contribution wider, deeper still, to what empathy gives our world. The novelist Jane Smiley once wrote that the reading of novels would not die, but it could be “sidelined”, and then our society could be led by people who never read and thus never understand the perspectives of others. Empathy for others is one of the most salient aspects of deep reading, and in today’s polarized world where reading is declining, the threats to democracy are no longer remote. We need our young to be able to experience what immigrant children think and feel when their parents are in danger; what a screen-addicted teenager thinks about staying in school;  what a dyslexic boy feels when he can’t read in front of the class. We need our young to have that form of empathy that ensures that our society can hear every voice in its democratic way of life.