American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper is one approach to teaching graduate students in education to become culturally empathetic. This paper was written when America’s racial divide expanded and Black and Brown Americans were killed by police who were not charged, and White American nationalists who want to “Make America Great Again”. The pandemic that locked down our nation and stopped business as usual left people isolated and idol thus creating a petri dish for civil unrest to grow. The population of adult educators was immersed in other cultures through critically analyzing ethnographies, memoirs, through the lens of cultural theories. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that graduate adult education students can develop empathy for populations, they will encounter within their spaces of work that they may feel oppose their access to opportunity. Participants boast about how the narratives reminded them of the common plight amongst populations previously viewed unfavorably. Within these themes, learners acknowledged that the process had transformed how they think about the other.