Too Much Relating
Center for Faculty Innovation
October 30, 2025
Snapshot: I went to India on my own between my junior and senior years of college. I remember distinctly feeling my whiteness in small villages; people stared at me, wanted to touch me, and followed me around. I remember thinking, Gosh, this is what it must be like for folks of color at home. I’m getting a little taste. Well, no. Not exactly. I was choosing to go to India (which not everyone can afford) and I could opt out of those experiences at any time (and, indeed, I came home earlier from this trip than I’d planned, for a variety of reasons). My discomfort was temporary, elected, instructional, and ultimately, endable.
Snapshot: Laura Henigman, Associate Professor of English and American Studies and Coordinator of the American Studies minor here at JMU, gave a presentation during a Fall 2023 CAL Faculty Pedagogy Panel (shout out to Siân White for organizing these!), which featured recent course development grant recipients. Laura presented on her “Native American Literature” course and included reflections on “responsible reticence” and the dangers of “too much relating.”
Snapshot: I was at Pale Fire with a friend last year and I was telling him about something difficult that had happened in my life. He is a very empathetic person and responded to the story with characteristic compassion, connecting my struggles with so many others and even his own. Yet I also felt there was something ill-fitting about his response. The situation I was sharing was rather distinct. It wasn’t actually like anything he (or others) had experienced. This wasn’t me having “main character syndrome,” I don’t think, but rather me wanting him to recognize that perhaps this wasn’t a situation that many people can actually relate to.
Snapshot: My ten-year-old daughter prefers graphic novels these days, especially a series called Dork Diaries. These books are squarely about her world (or her aspirational world). They are about cliques, gossip, drama, crushes, popularity, heartbreak, “mean girls,” and more. As I’ve become more and more concerned about the diminishment of reading skills—in myself, in my students, and in my daughter—I’ve started to institute “deep reading time” at home, which is essentially just time that my daughter has to spend reading a book from a shelf of my childhood books (Charlotte’s Web, Anne of Green Gables, etc.). In these books, the vocabulary is different, the places are different, the politics are different, the technology is different. It’s all foreign to her. She doesn’t like it one bit.
From what we know about learning and motivation, so much hinges on the connections we can encourage students to make to the material and how relevant they perceive it to be to their lives. The American Psychological Association acknowledges that students are motivated by “how personally important the course material is to them.” I’ve always tried to emphasize to students the importance of making personal connections to course material. I include questions on my quizzes like “Describe a connection between something from our course this week and your life outside of class.” I ask them to illustrate concepts from class with examples from their own lives. I ask them to pick topics that personally interest them for final projects. I sometimes even try to make these connections for them.
The snapshots above tell a different story. There are limits to how much we can relate to others. There are limits to our ability to put ourselves into someone else’s shoes. There are limits to relevance, personal connection, applicability, and what’s familiar. What are the dangers and distortions of too much relatability? What are the risks of constantly connecting everything to oneself—with the implication that, if we can’t, something doesn’t, or can’t, have any meaning? What meaning, instead, can be found in difficulty, in strangeness, in otherness, in discomfort, in incommensurability?
Last year I read Adam Grant’s latest book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, which emphasized the importance of staying open and curious and humble, as well as being willing to rethink. In today’s world of (seemingly) omnipresent knowledge and global connectivity and algorithms and social media and cancel culture and AI summaries—all of which puts us at the center of the universe and gives us the (usually woefully misguided) feeling that we know more than we do—perhaps we need to figure out ways to motivate students without making it always so relatable.
