Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share one’s feelings. Understanding the circumstances, needs, problems and solutions of people around us helps one understand themselves better, engage with themselves better and create meaningful interactions in the world. One’s creativity and flow of information towards them helps develop their empathic abilities, encourage critical thinking, and push them to analyze situations more collectively rather than individually. This creates more intellectually interdependent individuals and helps them become better learners.
Empathy in education and learning allows students to emotionally interact with the environment around them. It increases their ability to think from the “other-person's perspective.” that sparks better problem solving abilities in them.
But how to develop empathy? What encourages it? How is it formed? How can it be implemented in a classroom?
The “Other Person” or the analysis of the other person’s perspective, problems, environment, life-style feelings often lead to the development of empathy. Most toddlers and young children often have the ability to put life in their toys, talk to them, treat them with care and play with them. They tend to empathize with their feelings and think from their perspective as they befriend them.They try to understand their problems of their soft-toys dolls, puppets and cars and try to connect with them,creatively providing each of them with their own personal story, problems and solutions. At this tender age, they often have greater empathic abilities that fade away as they grow up.
Interactions help design empathy, as it reinforces desired behaviors. How students, interact in teams, individually, how do they complete their projects and how they engage with their peers etc. Teachers, parents too have a great impact in fostering empathy in education, for instance they can interact with students with phrases such as “ I see you’ve worked hard for this project” Using encouraging phrases motivates them to work harder and learn better and build empathy in classrooms.
An empathy driven learning environment is an important element that aids in a child’s growth. It is significant as it helps students to connect to the material that they are learning. Be it solving math problems like “how many chocolates does Lily get if there are 10 to be distributed equally” or “Why wear woolen clothes in winters” Empathy allows every student to put themselves in some-one else's shoes and see the world from that perspective. For instance, on the subject of History they can better relate to the freedom struggle, in economics, they get better understanding of unequal distribution of resources, in math it may be concerned with problem solving abilities etc. Hence the importance of empathy in learning can be observed with students better connecting to multiple cultures, various backgrounds and being more valuable in a society.
