university.nae.school
Mark Orrow-Whiting
Director of Curriculum and Student Performance
Education Team
Empathy: An Introduction
This month’s Connect-Ed is focused on the concept of Empathy, which, according to Shaffer (1996), is “the emotional responsiveness which an individual shows to the feelings experienced by another person [or] the ability to identify with another's emotions and understand what they are feeling.”
This ties nicely into International Mindedness. In NAE we hope that internationally minded students will be open-minded about the common humanity of all people and accept and respect other cultures, beliefs and the natural environment. How can students do this if they don’t develop empathy?
Howard Gardner, the Harvard Professor who argued that there was more than one “intelligence” and that IQ tests were not able to assess all the aspects of a rounded young person, said that international mindedness was the “decline of egocentrism” (1981).
Gardner, and other great psychologists (including Wilber, Hoffman and even Piaget) suggested:
1. When a baby is born, it is completely self-centered, caring only for its own needs
2. Eventually an infant gains the ability to understand that the world exists outside of the self in the physical sense (but not the emotional)
3. Later the concept of the self is completely grasped by the child (physically and emotionally)
4. The young adolescent begins to become socio-centric - family, culture, religion and nationality become extensions of the self
5. Some humans become global-centric and begin seeing the entire world as an extension of the self
To develop international mindedness we need to help students begin to see the entire world as an extension of the self – or, putting it another way, put themselves in the shoes of others. However, this is
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only the beginning… students need to do more than just take others’ perspectives (cognitive empathy), they need to move through feeling others’ emotions (called personal distress, or emotional contagion) and develop what Riggio (2011) terms ‘Emotional Concern’ and Goleman (2007) calls ‘Empathic Concern’ – recognising others’ emotional state, feeling in tune with it, showing appropriate concern and being spontaneously moved to help, if needed.
So, how do we develop these different ‘types of empathy’ in our students, and help them to become more internationally minded? You’ll find a few suggestions in this issue, but also lots more on NAU – and if you have ideas of your own then why not share them on one of our discussion forums.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
■ Primary children – play continent collections: get several large boxes and label each a continent. Encourage students to bring in artefacts that relate to different continents from home. Before they add it, they have to say what it is and why it belongs.
■ Middle school children – read “Where I am from” by George Ella Lyon and encourage students to make up and share their own poems of where they are from.
■ High school students – lead the school in developing NAE Global Challenge projects, in association with UNICEF.