Nurturing Ecological Empathy: Pedagogical Approaches from the US, Italy, Germany, and Ecuador

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Citizenship education: Learning for Sustainable, Democratic, and Peaceful Societies

Proposal

Introduction

In the face of the environmental catastrophe unfolding all around us, "we are desperate for any sign of hope,” Greta Thunberg announced at the 2019 COP25 talks in Madrid (BBC, 2019) “There is hope - I've seen it - but it does not come from the governments or corporations, it comes from the people… Every great change in history comes from the people. We can start the change right now, we the people.”

Many of us look to the next generation for hope. Given the perpetually inadequate response of government officials to meaningfully confront the climate crisis, mobilizing youth may in fact be our only source of hope. Educational approaches which foster a love of nature and empower youth as environmental stewards may thus offer promise in addressing the climate catastrophe and building a more sustainable future.

This paper explores the pedagogy of ecological empathy—drawing upon a cross-cultural qualitative study of 120 preschool and primary school teachers in the USA, Italy, Germany, and Ecuador. I will begin by arguing the importance of nurturing ecological empathy, drawing upon research which demonstrates its potential to promote conservation behavior. I will then share a collection of stories, curricular strategies, and insights from teachers around the world about how they cultivate ecological empathy in their students—including wisdom and practices learned from my fieldwork with Indigenous communities in Ecuador. My hope is to illustrate the capacity for primary school teachers to play a meaningful role in mitigating climate change through the development of ecological empathy—both in and outside of the classroom.

What is ecological empathy?

Ecological Empathy (or “eco-empathy”) is empathy directed towards the natural world. The concept is closely related to the construct of nature connectedness, and can be understood as the ability to connect with nature—both cognitively and affectively (Fido & Richardson, 2019). For Wang et al. (2022, p. 654), “Empathy with nature means acknowledging the needs of animals, nature in general, and the importance of their survival, as well as showing interest in their well-being.”

How can ecological empathy measured? Kim-Pong Tam (2013) developed the Dispositional Empathy with Nature (DEN) scale, which she adapted from the widely used Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI, Davis, 1983). The DEN scale has been used by psychologists and educators in myriad contexts, to measure empathy towards nature in both children and adults (Susan, 2019). In the validation of her dispositional empathy scale (DEN), Tam (2013) found that DEN robustly predicted both public (e.g. protesting or supporting an environmental organization) and private (e.g. recycling, turning off lights, etc.) conservation behavior.

Likewise, Berenguer (2007) showed that environmental behaviors and attitudes could be increased through empathy-inducing perspective-taking exercises. Through a path analysis, the author found that evoking empathy for a bird or a tree served as a moderator for a participants’ willingness to practice conservation behaviors or adopt pro-environmental attitudes. This finding was further corroborated by Ienna and colleagues (2022) in their study of 878 Australian online participants found that both empathy and knowledge of environmental issues predicted both pro-environmental attitudes and behavior.

This preliminary research suggests that promoting ecological empathy can support increased conservation attitudes and behavior. Fostering ecological empathy in schools may therefore be a promising approach to nurturing a generation of environmental stewards, thus providing a pathway to combat the climate crisis on a broader scale.

Empirical Study of Ecological Empathy

In 2022, I began a cross-cultural study exploring how teachers around the world foster empathy, and particularly ecological empathy. Thus far, I have conducted 103 semi-structured interviews with preschool and primary school teachers in the USA, Italy, Germany, and Ecuador—all of whom have self-identified with the goal of promoting empathy in their students. (In total my study will include 120 teachers, as my interviews are still in progress.)

This study is qualitative in nature, and involves 1:1 semi-structured interviews of primary school teachers (as well as administrators and other school staff), observations of empathy lessons taught in their classrooms, and document analysis of student work from these lessons. This multi-modal study design allows me to triangulate my findings by gathering data from multiple perspectives.

My methodology in this study employs a positive deviance approach (Marsh et al., 2004)—looking for best practices amongst teachers in the field who aim to cultivate empathy in their students on a daily basis. My goal is to shine a spotlight on teachers who are successfully teaching and cultivating empathy in their classrooms, through a variety of pedagogical techniques. As Ravitch and Carl explain, “Positive deviance recognizes ‘the community’s latent potential to self-organize, tap its own wisdom, and address problems long regarded with fatalistic acceptance” (Pascale et al., 2010, as cited in Ravitch & Carl, 2020, p. 7). By going to regions and schools where I know empathy is being fostered in youth, I aim to identify pedagogical strategies and gain insights for how empathy can be nurtured in the PreK-5 environment.

During my time in Ecuador, I have been able to meet and learn from Indigenous teachers working at a bilingual Kichwa school in the coastal region as well as several Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Through this fieldwork, my goal is to uplift and honor the wisdom of Indigenous communities to better understand how we might foster more connection and care for nature amongst our youth. By sharing their stories and insights, as well as my own observations of their pedagogical work in practice, I hope that my research will shine a light on some promising approaches to combating climate change from the Indigenous perspective. My overall goal for this work is to uplift pedagogical exemplars, share their stories of empathy cultivation, and ultimately promote the development of ecological empathy on a broader scale—in service of a more just and sustainable world.

Author

• AnnaLise Hoopes, UCLA