In the grounds of Homerton College, Cambridge , next to the Faculty of Education building where I work, stands a sculpture of a child by Betty Rea (1959) entitled Stretching Figure. It has been described as āā¦expressing the diverse emotions, activities, and grace of youthā (Whiteley, 2004). Such qualities are explored in this book and specifically childrenās capacity for empathy, emotion and engagement in education and life itself. Not so long ago, children were considered incapable of all these things. Not only do we now know that they are proficient in these activities, but their aptitude has in its wake informed and helped adults to understand not only the children, but in turn the adults themselves, both as parents and as teachers.
Children are at forefront of this book. We begin our lives as babies and it is therefore important to be able to understand why, when and how we start thinking. In particular, the focus for the book is why, when and how children exhibit empathy and emotion and the role that we as adults have in shaping this emotion for their development but also for their education. It is apparent that babies arrive already equipped with a social and emotional awareness of others, but it is also apparent that this awareness is malleable and affected by the people around them. In other words, peopleās responses to the growing infant matter, and have the potential to make or break that growing individual. So, from parenting to pedagogy, letās set the scene: the people: babies, children, parents and teachers; the places: home and school; and the themes: empathy, emotion and education.
The who, the where and the how: bringing all these aspects together, this book is a confluence and culmination of work focusing on a special concept of empathy that bestows affinity with, identification to, and a reflection for others. This is the story of one concept and its power on the lives of others in a variety of situations: one concept and its influence on a range of people and contexts. As Alfred Adler wrote: āEmpathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of anotherā. When we as parents and teachers listen and respond appropriately to children, they respond appropriately back and thrive as people and as learners. Moreover, just as children learn from parents and teachers, so parents and teachers can learn from children. It is about us listening as parents and insisting that schools should listen too. From babies to children to parents to teachers, we all have empathy and the capacity to use it from an early age, and for the better. It may sound obvious and simple to most people, but often it is the most obvious and simple tasks that get overlooked. And as well as being simple and obvious, it is effective and essential. This book is a journey from empathy to emotion and from emotion to education and back to empathy again. It advocates the recognition and use of a synthesis of emotion and cognition among children, parents and teachers and sets out to prove that through a combination of thoughts and feelings working in synchrony, where there are secure attachments with parents and teachers, where adults listen to the voices of children, the outcome is engaged and empowered individualsāboth children and adultsāwho value their teaching and learning and indeed themselves.
People respond in a variety of ways to the experiences they encounter. Some immerse themselves in the situations they experience, others attempt to do so, whilst others donāt seem to be able to do so at all. This reflects the degree of empathy that each one of us possesses. Of course, even within the same individual, the amount of empathy can be context-dependent, depending on how far we can or want to identify with the situation in hand. Such a range of empathic responding and mixed emotions might take a variety of forms ranging from an extreme reaction, as in the case when one of my children was very young and I found myself responding excessively to a situation whilst walking in the garden as my son began to pluck newly sprung daffodils. In an attempt to stop him doing this, I urged him not to pick any more, saying that the daffodils would be āsad and cryā, my son retorted that they couldnāt cry because they didnāt have eyes. How sensible! And bodes well to my sonās logical nature but also questioningly to my over-empathising, anthropomorphising side. A less extreme example is where the onlooker is trying their best to empathise, such as in the words I heard on the radio the other day, spoken by a man trying to make sense of a contentious issue: āI canāt imagine what itās like, but it must be awfulā¦ā. And from this to the complete and utter lack of empathic ability, such as that shown by psychopaths, hardened terrorists, or people who havenāt been exposed to empathy themselves.
From daffodils to displays devoid of empathy, such responses range from over-emotional to completely lacking in emotion. Most of us have something in betweenāa healthy balance of empathy, which we have most probably acquired throughout our lives from babies via our social interactions. In order to empathise effectively, we typically will have experienced the situation ourselves and are able to understand and/or feel what that person is going through and also give an appropriate response to it. Examples of this are apparent when a child witnesses another childās anguish on losing their toy and approaches the distressed child offering their own toy in order to help. Effective empathy therefore is not only an asset in helping to understand and feel along with the other, but can also result in appropriate and constructive responses. Like DNA, which is the building block of life, empathy is the building block of social life; and like DNA, a form of empathy is present at birth. But unlike the building block of life that is DNA, the building block of social life that is empathy is further affected by lifeās experiences and amasses throughout oneās lifetime, or at least has the potential to do so. This social phenomenon is acquired contagiously through social interaction with parents, siblings and peers; and it has profound uses in establishing relationships throughout life, so that we can understand each other on a level playing field and know where the other is ācoming fromā.
A Fusion of Psychology and Education
I have been fortunate to work in the fields of both psychology and education, and in more recent years I have taught the disciplines together focusing on the field of psychology and how its various theories inform and relate to education. My research in developmental psychology goes back to my PhD when I researched the construct of empathy. Despite since researching a variety of topics within education, I have come to realise that within these topics and in education generally, empathy was never far away. This birdās-eye view has enabled me to connect the concept of empathy across the two disciplines of psychology and education. Specifically, this vantage point has allowed me to link the ability of children to empathise across the two domains of psychology and education, and this book will incorporate my own research with selections of work from the literature. So, the idea for this book emerged when after years of researching and teaching in psychology and education, despite working within different disciplines and with different agendas, a serendipitous common thread with interlinked themes was identified. Themes were identified that are not only interlinked but informed each other, within and across the two disciplines. The book therefore represents a convergence of my work, past and present, firstly in the field of developmental psychology and then in education, and an attempt to unite the disciplines of psychology and education in a common goal of effectively connecting and learning through an inter-disciplinary perspective.
This book has been inspired predominantly from my research over the last 25 years. I have researched empathy in a variety of forms, as well as other constructs of emotion and moral development, beginning at the department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of London , through my PhD thesis looking at childrenās capacity to engage with their peers in distress. Subsequently again at the Institute of Psychiatry but this time in the centre of Social, Genetic and Developmental Research, I researched topics that included childrenās relationships in association with their social and moral development. And then through my research at the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge , I focused on pupilsā and teachersā abilities to engage in teaching and learning and thus improve the quality of learning. It has been an empathy journey that has come full circle, firstly by looking at toddlersā and young childrenās abilities to empathise with their peers and then turning to the school context and engaging with pupils in order to empower them and enhance their empathy and awareness for a variety of issues that affect their teaching and learning. The journey has taken me from the arena of developmental psychology to research in education. Despite conducting research into education on a variety of topics and for a number of funding bodies such as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) , Department for Education (DfE) , Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) , as well as my own personally applied for research grants, my original psychologically based research re-emerged. A relatively recent epiphany revealed that quite unintentionally and despite working in different places with different agendas, most of what I have researched is not unrelated. Indeed much of the research has covered similar ground and consolidated the other. My early research investigated childrenās capacity to empathise through their reactions to their peersā distress across early and middle childhood. Subsequent research focusing on childrenās friendships, their awareness of fairness and then pupil voice research where pupils were consulted about their teaching and learning, all emerged with a remarkable insightfulness on the part of pupils both at primary and secondary school to empathise with their own and othersā situations. The diverse focus of my research has been complemented by the varied methodological techniques: both qualitative and quantitative, from case studies to small data sets to large data sets; inductive exploratory versus deductive hypothesis-driven; and using observation, interviews, specific tasks and questionnaires as a means of data collection. Although varied, much of my more recent research corroborates and reinforces my early research, bringing clarity and piecing together bits of the puzzle that is childrenās capacity for empathy and its uses for education.
Within the context of education, it is of course important to know your subject matter as a teacher. But the thesis of this book also advocates the importance of knowing who is being taught, so that both the what and who are taught go hand in hand. Coming from both developmental psychology and education perspectives, this book pools research that emphasises the importance of acknowledging and incorporating the social and emotional aspects of teaching. As a consequence, this book will be of interest to a broad audience, namely, parents, educators, researchers, psychologists, new teachers and policy makers. The book aims to provide the audience with a rounded view of the children they parent, teach, research, and the benefits of conceptualising the child/pupil/student/learner as a social and emotional being, as well as a learning being. Indeed, Palmer (1998) spoke of the separation of the head from the heart as contributing to an educational system filled with broken paradoxes that result in āā¦minds that do not know how to feel and hearts that do not know how to thinkā (p. 68). But, as the next section shows, youngsters have not always been afforded with a particularly sophisticated social and emotional prowess. So I will recount briefly how babies and toddlers have been perceived historically and how that has changed relatively recently and over a relatively short space of time.
āNobody Puts Baby in a Cornerā!
Up until the recent past, the faculties of babies and children were regarded as limited. They have been placed āin a cornerā and ignored, as per the draconian notion of āseen and not heardā. Influential psychologists such as the behaviourist John B. Watson who wrote Psychological Care of Infant and Child in 1928 recommended strict schedules and warned against excessive affection. Another psychologist around the late 1920s, G. Stanley Hall, concurred with Watson regarding the parent-child relationship, warning against sentimentality and emotional connection and promoting physical punishments. Both men viewed children as being malleable, but Watson went a step further, believing in the Pavlovian tradition, much like the salivating dogs, that children could be manipulated and moulded entirely. The main thesis of this book is that this perception and treatment was to the detriment of both children and adults. Even as relatively recently as the 1950s, the science of developmental psychology has come a long way. My children would say that that was a long time ago, positively prehistoric. But in the whole scheme of things, it is the recent past, and a past that held babies and infants in a very different light to the one we know today. Researchers were now beginning to understand more about the capabilities of babies and young children, and as such came revelations and revolutions in parenting and teaching.
From the 1950s, researchers were discovering new and hitherto unknown bona fide features of babies and infants. Such skills included their sensitivity to others and their influence in relationships, and moreover that parents and the love they provide do matter for childrenās ensuing development. Two ground-breaking books that emerged post-war contributed to this cornerstone in history. As we were discovering babiesā capabilities, Dr Benjamin Spockās (1946) book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care prescribed a more child-centred approach to childrenās upbringing. Despite attracting considerable criticism for many of his recommendations, especially in the early editions, Spockās book appealed to parents as it pioneered a child-focused concept involving parent-child interaction that was hitherto unfamiliar. The bookās popularity led to it being a staple among books in many a household, including my own as I was growing up. Many editions of the book have since been produced, improved and updated to make them relevant to the present day, but its core concept of engaging with the child has endured.
By 1973, a book emerged entitled The Competent Infant by Stone, Smith and Murphy, which eradicated notions of the previously regarded passive babies as a mere bunch of reflexes whose insensibilities made them oblivious to faces, colour and pretty much everything in their vicinity. Such revolutionary thinking went against the grain of the previous schools of thought that endorsed withholding affection from their children, especially by fathers, and not attempting to understand their children. Seeing a gap in the market, Spock encouraged parents to attend to their babiesā and childrenās psychological as well as physical needs. In so doing, Spock reflected the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner who believed in positive reinforcement to encourage desirable behaviour. Rather than classical conditioning as espoused by Watson and Pavlov , in which responses become conditioned by environmental factors, Skinner believed responses could be moulded through so-called operant conditioning. Even as recently as 1964, the human infant at birth and soon after was described crudely as brainless: ādecorticatedā. The books by Spock and Stone et al. were therefore revolutionary in showing that babies are sensitive to others, take heed of and value and nature of relationships, and moreover that parents and love matters. The headline was that babies were now to be perceived as real people with feelings and emotions. Such books also sparked arguments about the effect of the environment on the developing infant in relation to their genetic make-up. This was an important discussion as it alluded to the impact of the environment and whether nurturing could make a difference.
The nature versus nurture debate is overarching, all-encompassing, and continues to this day, constantly seeking to discover the origins and reasons behind our behaviour. Over the years, researchers, scientists and philosophers in the areas of psychology and education have envisioned the developing, learning child in different ways. From an empty vessel to a blank slate, the philosophy of empiricism as advocated by John Locke whose vision of the child was a blank slate or tabula rasa, meant that the quality of parenting would have a significant effect. The psychology of behaviourism, as promoted by John Watson and B.F. Skinner surmised that babies are born impartial but with an inborn capacity to learn from experience and require social and emotional experiences to shape their development, an essential ingredient without which they cannot develop socially, emotionally or intellectually. By contrast, some philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau took a nativist stance believing in an innate capacity of children that would ensure their development regardless of social and emotional intervention. Around the same time as these psychological developments were revolutionising our thinking about childrenās abilities and the effects of caregiversā interactions with them, the field of education was valuing the use of emotion in teaching. John Dewey (1933) wrote of the necessity to address studentsā emotions in education: āā¦There is no education when ideas and knowledge are not translated into emotion, interest, and volitionā (p. 189). Combining nature and nurture, others such as Maria Montessori believed that both play a part in development, and along with others such as Jean Piaget , they maintained such a constructivist approach. All these views were visionary and are still debated today, and their perspectives have prevailed and stood the test of time, as they are still being taught at all levels and applied and incorporated to lesser and greater degrees, depending on allegiances, in both research and practice. What this book aims to show is that there is a balance between the two opposing views, taking the stance of an already equipped babyās brain, which has the potential to be moulded through social interaction to form a social, emotional and thinking individual. More recently, the field of education has acknowledged the importance of emotional intelligence and recognised a focus beyond that of the acquisition of content knowledge thereby providing a ...