VOLUME 20
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ISSUE 2
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OCTOBER 2021
THE TOOLBOX A Teaching and Learning Resource for Instructors
NOW MORE THAN EVER: THE VITAL ROLE OF EMPATHY IN TEACHING T
he past two years have been tumultuous Brad Garner and challenging for instructors and students Tiffany Snyder Innovation and Partnerships in higher education. The COVID pandemic, Indiana Wesleyan University a transition from classroom-based instruction to Emergency Remote Teaching, heightened awareness of social justice issues, and the Black Lives Matter movement have dramatically impacted colleges and universities and their students worldwide. Realistically, these issues will not go away quietly. This reality requires that instructors actively engage with students in a caring and supportive manner to help them process what they are learning and understand their place in the larger scheme of world events. In this issue of The Toolbox, we will examine how instructors can demonstrate empathy to create a supportive and caring environment for their students.
An Incredibly Brief History of Empathy Given the widespread use of the term, it may be somewhat surprising to learn that the concept of demonstrating empathy is relatively new. One of the first references to empathy is attributed to the English psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener’s translation of the German term Einfüflung, which roughly means “in feeling” (Titchener, 1908). This translation, however, and the concept of what we know as empathy today were not originally intended to reference how one understands the emotional status of others. Instead, it described physiological responses and feelings experienced when viewing various colors, angles, and shapes.Things like the curve of a jar or the horizontal lines of a mahogany chair were thought to create certain types of emotional responses on the part of observers (Lanzoni, 2018). In a brilliant review of the history of empathy, Lanzoni (2018) reported the word empathy did not appear in the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary or the Concise Oxford Dictionary until 1944 and then only as an addition to defining the German term Einfühlung. Lanzoni also noted a dramatic increase in the widespread use of this term in the decades following World War II. Even though the exact use of the word empathy was not used with uniform meaning, it was used quite often about movies and theater productions, to explain responses to the performance of sporting teams,
National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience® and Students in Transition, University of South Carolina
Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.
—Alfred Adler, Austrian psychotherapist (1870-1937)
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