Seek 6 Sunday
Today’s find is all about empathy:
1. This is an interesting read which poses the question, should we develop empathy in higher education settings? It presents interesting points. For example, in the most selective universities economically advantaged students out number economically disadvantaged students 25:1. Does this make it harder for more advantaged students to empathize?
2. This resource describes the value of empathy as it relates to school culture and community. It provides steps schools can follow to foster empathy building, the first one being modeling (which I find to be crucial). It also poses realistic barriers to consider when doing this work.
3. This is a book that I’ve worked with a little bit in my line of work. It is a leadership based text to teach emotional intelligence to college students. I have used it to help develop leadership programming, and I have partaken in workshops based on these ideas. It definitely ties in well to empathy and ways to teach and learn it.
4. This resource, from Virginia Commonwealth University, provides 5 ways to incorporate empathy building into the classroom, using experiential learning and reflection as tools.
5. This guide is geared more towards traditional classroom settings, so I think it may be more helpful to some of my ED677 peers. It provides real activities that you can use to tie empathy building into already existing lessons and curriculum. I also see ways they could be adapted for use in a higher education setting.
6. Teaching Tolerance is a huge resource in the field of education. I feel that one of the many benefits of empathy building is that it teaches students to relate to their peers and people in the world around them, even if they aren’t the same. Teaching tolerance explores ways to reduce hate and foster peace.
