More Than a Feeling? Students’ Empathy During Social Studies Discussions

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Abstract

While an operational definition of empathy in social studies education remains elusive, researchers and practitioners largely agree it is a worthy outcome and productive process for learning social studies content. This study explores student engagement with historical and contemporary topics through their empathic analyses during social studies discussions. We focus on 11 discussions where students demonstrated high levels of empathy according to a scale we developed. Our results suggest that students will engage in more robust and productive empathy when their thinking is bolstered by the opportunity to contextualize historical or contemporary actors’ choices and consider how their own positionality may shape assumptions about historical and contemporary events and ways of knowing that ground their empathy.

Authors

• Timothy Patterson, Temple University

• Joseph Eisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Lindsey Graham, University of Pennsylvania

• Lightning Jay, Binghamton University - SUNY

• Jenni Conrad, Oregon State University