Page 18 - FIS World November 2016

Empathy in the i-World
A balanced nurturing of the physical and digital worlds
Welcome to the i-World: a space accessible by everyone’s de facto sixth sense – a personal mobile device – where knowing how to portray yourself is a critical existential skill. Where pointer ngertips replace mouths, eyes and #no lter faces to communicate feelings with one tap for the common “like” or “love,” to the more complex tap-hold-slide pattern to access all six of Facebook’s emojis. In a world where this masked-and- mediated reality is now embedded as a vital organ, can one consider human empathy as anything but a free falling stock?
A much-cited 2010 study by the University of Michigan supports the nasty tradeo s of personal media: nearly 14,000 college students scored about 40% lower on empathy than their 1980s or 1990s counterparts. But subsequent research tells another story. A 2013 study of nearly 1,000 Dutch children aged 10-14 showed that over a one-year period, social media use signi cantly increased empathy. A 2014 study by the University of North Florida found patterns suggesting that Facebook may encourage empathic traits. And a 2015 study by California State University showed that time spent online didn’t starve “real word” empathy, but actually increased it.
Despite the sel es and 500+ personal friends lists, the technology often blamed for the end of empathy is also the technology that boosts it – especially among younger people. Social media makes us more informed about the struggles of those both inside and outside of our orbit, but does it make us feel the su ering of strangers as if it were our own?
Thankfully, neuroscience has gone and put our end-of-empathy fears to rest: to feel with others is a built-in survival trait that is imprinted into our brains. Feeling the pain of people whom we feel connected to, as pain to ourselves,
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is hardwired into 98% of humankind, and is what drives us to defend our dearest as ercely as ourselves, cooperate intuitively and survive as a social species. Empathy, as a hardwired trait, is in no imminent danger of fading, so the current surge of educational and policy initiatives focused on developing our empathic IQ are surely about something other than preventing the extermination of empathy by egoist technology. What could that be?
Empathy, Cooperation, Respect – are everywhere, and every Unit of Inquiry o ers opportunities to practice empathy. For instance, the Community unit in Grade 2 is all about, ‘if I know who you are, I will have a better relation with you.’ In Grade 4, the Decision-Making unit explores the consequences of kind and unkind behavior, and the Walkathon in Grade 5 is about raising awareness to those less fortunate and putting oneself in their shoes.”
But it is not just about the PYP. As Ms. Darling points out, “it is also in the International Bacculaureate (IB) learner pro le, our school’s mission and beliefs, and in our tenets of Digital Citizenship.” Upper School Principal Rhiannon Wood agrees. “Empathy is woven into many facets of everyday life. In the Upper School, it falls under the umbrella of Transdisciplinary skills and there are plenty of opportunities to develop it further – through extended homeroom activities, in English, in Humanities, and through our service organizations and other community support activities.”
Back to School Night gave me a rst-hand taste of how empathy is woven into the Upper School curriculum. Every presentation I heard had an empathy development topic. In Humanities, it was coastal erosion and putting oneself in the shoes of a homeowner in Happisburgh; in German, Grade 7 students will read a book about a boy who must survive on his own after World War II, and will also learn about refugees from that era; in English, they will read The Giver, a book that a current Grade 10 student Mishel Sternberg remembers helping distinguish an important di erence: “Empathy is feeling with, like being them; sympathy is feeling for, like an external observer. The Giver helps develop both,” she explained.
Theory of Knowledge (TOK), an IB requirement, also develops cognitive empathy through the understanding
“Being an
international PYP
school implies an
empathy-supportive
curriculum.”
Dawn Darling, ES Asst. Principal
Andreas Schleicher, who spoke at the Global Education Industry Summit in September, considers that many continue to have a conservative view of the core skills of 21st century education: reading, writing and counting, and in the best of cases, cooperation, creativity and entrepre- neurship. The question for educators and policymakers to ask, he suggests, is what are those skills going to be used for: to build a better world, or to destroy it? He suggests that in a world that prizes how we apply what we know, not what we know, the skills that tip the evolution-destruction scale are “social and emotional skills that help people live and work together” – skills like courage, integ- rity, tolerance, curiosity, resilience, leadership, empathy. The very same that we nd embedded in the beliefs and day-to-day life at FIS.
“Being an international Primary Years Programme (PYP) school implies an empathy-supportive curriculum,” says Dawn Darling, Elementary School Vice Principal. “Our core values – Tolerance,