Empathy in Teacher Education
Pre-service teacher cohorts in Australia and internationally are comprised of students from culturally disparate and diverse language backgrounds, and classrooms in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand are similarly comprised. Pre-service teacher candidates bear the complex burden of not only meeting diverse studentsâ needs but also provisioning them with multiple ways to âbe in the worldâ (OâGrady, 2016). By catalysing the affordances of traditions used in the theatre as a way to activate an understanding of complex ideas in a safe space, the garnering of and resultant increase in empathy are exemplified in case studies that reflect this impact.
Any substantive conversation about moving towards a pedagogy of empathy requires that the reader explores theories of empathy from neuroscientific and cognitive approaches.
Perspectives in teacher practice and how this approach might be grounded in and illuminated through practice and praxis orientations are considered here. A brief contextualising literature review situates this work within the corpus of literature and discusses the nature of empathy as a social good. Additionally, discussions of practice and ample references to participatory approaches that have developed successful engagement with practitioners through the facilitation of creative work, in the tradition of theatre, are unpacked in the book.
Deliberations that promote empathy in teacher education and training programmes and how this approach can develop a repertoire and constellation of empathies for teachers to facilitate transformation in the classroom form a central line of inquiry. Explanations that develop theories regarding the way teachers work, particularly those still in the practice stage of their career trajectories, will be posited as part of a suite of skills to teach with, for and about empathy.
Pre-service teacher cohorts in Australia and internationally are made up of students from culturally disparate and diverse language backgrounds, and classrooms are similarly comprised and reflect the rich diaspora of countries that contribute to the dynamism of multiculturalism in Australia and internationally. Teachers are therefore tasked with meeting the diverse needs of their students.
In order to meet these knotty challenges and deliver authentic and nuanced pedagogies, teachers rely on social and emotional inherencies that may or may not have been learned. These skills of human engagement that teachers, it is assumed, are riven with are unreliably acquired. It is for these and other reasons, further explained in the book, that our need to develop empathy and habits of empathy exists.
Empathy, it seems, is at the forefront of our Western thinking. Superficially, this is no bad thing. Kindness, being more humane, thinking of others, and reflection are all arguably positive attributions or ways to behave to better and create a more tolerant society. However, empathy conceptually needs to be activated in productive and transformational ways. Empathy needs to be defined, problematised and distilled to have denotation, particularly for early career teachers who find themselves working in an age of increasing compliance and governance, wrestling with the complexity and chaos of the no longer new century, leaving little room for self-actualisation.
Debates About Empathy
The current debates in the field regarding empathy include in the area of character and moral education and positive psychology. Whilst this book does not propose to delve deeply into the area of psychology, it references current debates in the field which include understanding empathy in a professional context where empathy is often a key consideration in medical practice. A growing body of literature indicates that empathic behaviours are positively linked, in several ways, with the professional performance and mental well-being of professionals, and this book focuses on teachers who are in training, referred to as pre-service teachers in this debate. Many schools in the independent and private sectors (including charter schools) are articulating empathy as an outcome of their individualised learning programmes, recognising the value in developing students who are highly skilled in negotiation, collaboration and communication, for example. These previously derided âsoft skillsâ are currently the subject of debate as the world relies more heavily on artificial intelligences and the nature of traditional work becomes oblique. Harnessing the inherencies of the emotional and social human becomes paramount to our survival and leads to human flourishing.
Definitions of empathy vary widely, and this book will both problematise and define empathy. Drawing on the work of Maxine Greene (1995) and her argument that assembling a coherent world requires imagination in order to make empathy possible, discussions regarding the cognitive capacities of imagination and imagination as a generative learning activity (Fiorella & Mayer, 2015) that allow empathy to thrive are laid out in order to provide guidance.
Empathy is a multidimensional construct and can be loosely defined as an ability both cognitive and emotional that involves the capacity to insightfully read the feelings of another person and to respond appropriately, having understood social cues. Work from the âTheory of Mindâ (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) also acknowledges that empathy requires feeling as someone else may feel or engaging emotionally with another personâs state (Saxton, Miller, Laidlaw, & OâMara, 2018). Empathy may include compassion, but it also requires more than the placing of oneself in the shoes of another. It requires âa shift in perspective away from oneself, to an acknowledgment of the other personâs different experienceâ (Williams, Lynch, & Sifris, 2016, p. 171).
What Is This Thing Called Empathy?
Empathy is conceptually and historically situated in the discipline of psychology and philosophy as a twentieth-century phenomenon. In these disciplines there is no agreement on what empathy is; however, in borrowing from these traditions, understanding empathy and its place in education and the disciplines has become more important as the pace of change and particularly the nature of schooling become less fixed and pathways to work more tenuous for students. This also presents teachers who are preparing students for these complex futures with the difficult task of anticipating studentsâ needs in this climate of complexity. Whilst argument rages about the value of metrics, test scores and league tables (for both teachers and students), the centrally important work of relationships and how we understand each other and respond in humane ways is pressing. The phenomenologist and Catholic saint Edith Stein (a pupil of Husserl the phenomenologist (1859â1938), later murdered in the Auschwitz death camp) researched the problem of empathy as far back as the 1920s (ironically at the same time people were returning, many of them broken, from âthe war to end all warsâ) and in her findings argued that:
empathy precipitates an understanding of each other as others experience us and that through empathy, I can discern the otherâs mental states to at the same time gain self-knowledge by coming to know how others experience me. (1964, p. xiv)
For those working with empathy in interdisciplinary contexts or in school-based disciplines such as history, Stuber (2000) usefully argues for a way of teaching history where students can use an empathic intelligence to help predict and explain the way theatres of war might happen and the reasoning and perspective of others behind them. This begets a productive empathy initially.
Paul Bloom in his book Against Empathy (2016) on the other hand argues that empathy is a negative in human affairsâthat on balance its a âsugary soda, tempting and delicious and bad for usâ (p. 13) that it lacks reason and can allow us to align our understandings with those that are most like us. His hypothesis argues that empathy needs to be a âvalue of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday lifeâthat we should use our heads more than our hearts, for a rational and compassionate perspectiveâ (p. 5). His biggest problem with empathy is biasâhe argues that the problem with empathy is that it shines brightest on those we care about and stories we loveâthink about stories in history such as Gallipoli or the American Civil War; however, he believes that moral action and moral judgement are biased and that even when we try to be fair, to be impartial and to be objective, we tend to favour the outcome that benefits ourselves (p. 50).
So where is the place for empathy in subject disciplines? Teachers would argue (and I would agree) that empathic intelligence is fundamental to teaching and that empathy and social intelligence are âinherenciesâ in our professional identities. However, it is the place of pedagogic empathy in the disciplines and how we might position empathy that is critical in our thinking. Many scholars have posited that historical empathy is an essential outcome in the history curriculum, that it activates ways of discerning the difference between present lived experiences and life in very different and often culturally dissonant pasts than those of the students to whom this information is being transferred.
By way of example, Endacott and Brooks (2013) propose a model of historical empathy that is situative and suggests three endeavours: empathy as a historical contextualisation, a temporal sense and deep understanding; perspective taking, understanding the other (perhaps the most difficult concept); and affective connections, how similarities and differences make emotional connections in meaningful ways. Using drama-rich pedagogies (Ewing, 2019b) and drawing on principles of âprocess dramaâ (Bowell & Heap, 2013), pedagogies can be developed that facilitate transformative learning opportunities for students. This precipitates an opportunity for students to understand how the past influences the future and to know that there is not just one view of the past, but a range of views that may be contradictory, complementary and/or clashing. The singular testing of an event in history, such as the causes of World War One, cannot on its own provide a broad and valid education in history. Dramatic pedagogies and creative knowledge allow students an opportunity to articulate how a character might have arrived at a decision, gaining insight into their motivations and critically analysing or reconstructing an event; this coalesces giving form to fact and enabling engagement in empathic understanding of past events.
Empathy as a pedagogy can activate the boundaries of remembering particularly in the discipline of history, allowing for a lived experience that invites new ways of thinking about the body and self in space and time (Nicholson, 2012). The case study conducted at the University of Sydney in 2018 used the central figure of Dr. Elsie Dalyell, a medical officer in World War One and alumna of the university, to engage a broader a...