This study aims to develop a 4-week reading comprehension intervention, grounded in the practice of compassion, involving middle school students reading justice-oriented narrative texts. Compassion in this context is defined as a feeling (affective state) that arises in bearing witness to others’ suffering and an understanding (cognitive state) of the context from the perspective of the sufferer, which can lead to a desire to alleviate suffering. From this definition, I conceptualized a critically compassionate reading comprehension framework as a contemplative pedagogical practice in K12 education. The project uses a design-based research approach that seeks to design a high-quality learning environment through the process of instructional fine-tuning to address diverse learning needs in the classroom. I seek to answer this research question (RQ): How do teaching and learning of critically compassionate reading of justice-oriented fictional narrative texts promote students’ critical compassion and reading comprehension? Most of the studies on literacy and empathy focused on perspective-taking and mentalizing. There have been insufficient empirical studies that attempt to widen this socio-cognitive perspective to contemplative practices in children’s literacy skills. Furthermore, mindfulness studies on contemplative practices in K12 schools are therapeutic in orientation, as opposed to focused on compassionate pedagogy.
