Empathy: Make it or break it
Reading about empathy with regard to instructional design for adult participants, made me reflect on what it was like empathising with students when teaching preschool and kindergarten classes. Contrary to what most people would expect due to obvious differences between the audiences and their settings, empathy is equally perceived by both audiences the adult learners and the young children.
“Consideration of self, while considering others, is a component of the
process of taking another’s perspective” (Chadwick & Ralston as cited by Vann, 2017), and that consideration is noticed by the learners regardless of their age. While an adult might feel excluded from the session if the content is uncomprehensible or too hard to grasp, young children would look for something else to do which might have them wrongly labeled as ADHD candidates.
Thus the effect empathy -or the lack of it- has on the learner is an emotion as appointed by Trout (cited by Vann, 2017) saying that while empathy has to do with understanding the other person, sympathy is the positive emotion felt as a response to being understood. This might explain what happened to a colleague that, after hearing other teachers saying how much they enjoyed their time with their young students, she commented: “How can you stand them until 3:30 p.m.? I am wishing for the bell to ring since 10 a.m.!” (From personal experience). Her lack of empathy made the children behave in a way that challenged her patience constantly, and this might be seen as a survival mechanism from the children’s perspective while completely unacceptable from the teacher’s standpoint.
Empathical instructional design makes the participants feel welcomed since the learning ocurrs effortless due to the complementarity between empathy and sympathy. When empathy is intentionally present in the instructional design process it not only extends the design’s concept but also anticipates the achievements the design aims to obtain (Parrish as cited by Vann, 2017).
I conclude that for empathy to happen at least two things must ocurr beforehand: first, you should know your audience in order to be able to consider the content of the session from their perspective; and second, you should like what you do because your audience will notice, which would have an impact on their performance.
References
Vann, L. S., (2017) Demonstrating empathy: A phenomenological study of instructional designers. Making instructional strategy decisions for adult learners. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 2017, 29(2), 233-244. Retrieved from http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/