Search for: All records

Faculty members play a crucial role as change agents in promoting cultural transformation within academic environments and empathy, a fundamental component of effective teaching, mentoring, and collegiality, is essential for fostering a student-centered and holistic approach. We present a theoretical model for empathy development and navigation in physics faculty as they engage with students and colleagues. Two pathways—cognitive and affective—are connected with previous work and explored. Cognitive empathy, a slower, intellectual process, is mediated through reflective witnessing, whereas affective empathy, a faster, emotional process, builds on shared or adjacent lived experiences. Understanding the nuances associated with the different pathways can inform efforts to increase participation and foster an inclusive environment, which often presumes a meaningful understanding of what best supports individual students. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person’s thoughts and feelings — empathy — can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines their experiences empathizing with students, both in and outside of the classroom. We expand on frameworks for understanding the empathy process by identifying key mediating factors, and note various barriers that faculty express as preventing them from taking empathetic action. Our analysis unpacks the mechanisms of communication and contextual information, which play key roles in the empathetic process, with implications for programs that rely on empathy to develop more inclusive STEM academic spaces. 

Abstract We present the first results from the Web Epoch of Reionization LyαSurvey (WERLS), a spectroscopic survey of Lyαemission using Keck I/MOSFIRE and LRIS. WERLS targets bright (J< 26) galaxy candidates with photometric redshifts of 5.5 ≲z≲ 8 selected from pre-JWST imaging embedded in the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) within three JWST deep fields: CEERS, PRIMER, and COSMOS-Web. Here, we report 11z∼ 7–8 Lyαemitters (LAEs; three secure and eight tentative candidates) detected in the first five nights of WERLS MOSFIRE data. We estimate our observed LAE yield is ∼13%, which is broadly consistent with expectations assuming some loss from redshift uncertainty, contamination from sky OH lines, and that the Universe is approximately half-ionized at this epoch, whereby observable Lyαemission is unlikely for galaxies embedded in a neutral intergalactic medium. Our targets are selected to be UV-bright, and span a range of absolute UV magnitudes with −23.1 <M_UV< −19.8. With two LAEs detected atz= 7.68, we also consider the possibility of an ionized bubble at this redshift. Future synergistic Keck+JWST efforts will provide a powerful tool for pinpointing beacons of reionization and mapping the large-scale distribution of mass relative to the ionization state of the Universe.