Dr. Jennifer Howcroft and Dr. Kate Mercer believe that seeing the world through the eyes of students and empathizing with them is an essential pedagogical technique.
At a recent University of Waterloo teaching and learning conference, Howcroft and Mercer, both faculty members in the Department of Systems Design Engineering, hosted a session on “empathy as the foundation for a caring classroom,” which demonstrated practical techniques they use in their teaching.
Teaching and learning in engineering and other STEM disciplines can sometimes seem to be impersonal, in the sense that the subject matter is highly technical, and the focus is often on demonstrating discrete competencies.
“In a lot of STEM disciplines, there’s a focus on building technical skills,” Howcroft says. “I think there’s a lot of room to focus more on soft skills, like empathy, and to find ways to build these skills into teaching and learning. Empathy in the classroom can have a deep impact on students, not just in their academic life, but also their future professional and personal lives.”
In terms of how to deploy empathy in the classroom, Howcroft and Mercer say it requires a multifaceted approach. It is about empathy on the part of instructors toward students and the specific experiences they bring, but also about helping students to develop their own capacity for empathy not only for each other but also for the users they are designing for in their engineering courses.
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