Step Into Another's Shoes: Unpacking Teachers' Empathy Dispositions in Culturally Diverse Classrooms

• In Event: The Emotional Lives of Teachers Roundtable

Abstract

Teacher empathy is a critical disposition that enables teachers to meet the diverse needs of students. Recognizing that teacher empathy is complex and multi-dimensional, we explored its key dimensions - cognition, affect, and action – and the manifestation of each dimension along a continuum. Fifty-five teachers working in two urban elementary schools with a predominantly low SES, and Hispanic student population were individually interviewed. The findings confirm that teacher empathy is not a simple, unidimensional concept; instead, teachers exhibited variations of their empathy disposition across all three dimensions. The lack of consistency in high valence across three dimensions (e.g., high cognition, high emotion, high action) suggests the need for strong and consistent alignment between teachers’ asset-based thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Authors

• Ji Y. Hong, University of Oklahoma

• Crystal Diane Neill, University of Oklahoma

• Dionne Cross Francis, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Laura A. Lewis, University of Oklahoma

• Alexandra Parsons, University of Oklahoma

• Qian Wang, The University of Oklahoma

• Mihyun Jeon, Indiana University - Bloomington