Pink---Empathy

Empathy is the capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another sentient or fictional being. It is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else’s position and to intuit what that person is feeling. However, why empathy is so important especially in conceptual age? In this abundance world where L-Directed Thinking remains necessary but no longer sufficient, we must become proficient in R-Directed Thinking and master aptitudes that are high concept and high touch. Empathy is one of the most important one related to high touch. It is the age that the competition is not just about intellectual abilities, it is more about emotional abilities: the ability to deal with relationships and people’s interactions. We can imagine two lawyers on the same skill level, one can empathize with their clients and understand their true needs and one is just with knowledge of law. I think it is very obvious that which lawyer clients would choose. It is even more important in medical and business areas: people who have the sense of empathy are more likely to be successful. “Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lifes.”

Empathy is much more than vocational skill necessary for surviving twenty-first-century labor markets. It’s an ethic for living. Since empathy is crucial to deal with relationships, and our lives actually is all about relationships, it is an essential part of living a life of meaning. If we teach children to walk in someone else’s shoes, they will understand others’ feeling better and use it to guide their own actions. When they think from others’ perspectives when meet some problems, it will make them do better teamwork, have more friends and even have better marriages. They will easily be considerate and understandable and easily to get joy. That is all about the meaning of life.

The power of empathy is huge, but how could we teach it in an art curriculum? The first step is self-awareness: we need to be able to identify our own emotions, recognize them for what they are and acknowledge them. For this purpose, I think we could let them draw an image about the most unforgettable thing in their memory and share the stories with peers. Young students can hardly express things just in verbal because the vocabulary limited, so it is a good way to let them express their feelings through art. In this progress, we could let them listen to the music to recall their feelings. We should allow them to experience their emotions rather than block it.

Empathy begins with awareness of another person's feelings. It would be easier to be aware of other people's emotions if they would simply tell us how they felt. But since most people do not, we must resort to asking questions, reading between the lines, guessing, and trying to interpret non-verbal cues. I think in art class, an efficient way is to do Visual Thinking Strategies. Since facial expression is a part of visual culture, we could select images focus on people’s facial expressions and let students read faces. We can ask questions like “What can you see makes you say this person is in this emotion?” to improve their ability to read people’s face and boost their sense of empathy. Moreover, during the VTS, students should pay attention to their peers’ narratives and make connections with their own thoughts. If someone have different ideas from yours and show little respect to your idea, you will feel uncomfortable. In this way, students will know we should respect others’ ideas, because if not others will feel uncomfortable as well.

Theater and role-playing exercises are useful tools for enhancing the ability to empathize because they expand our emotional spectrum, train us to assume different identities, and insert us in another person's reality. In art class, we could ask students to imitate their peers and play other people’s life. My plan is to divide two students in a group, let them observe each other carefully for one day. And from the second day, they could use fabric and other materials to design the outfitters what their peers would like to wear. They will put them on and play a day of others in the end. For young kids, since the may be not able to make clothes, they could just design it and create an image of it. We will critique by asking questions like “What personalities and characteristics do you think about your peer?”  “Why do you think your peer will like your design?” For the role-play, I would ask: “What kind of emotion can you feel in your peer’s day?” I think the “feelings-based” curriculum will help them a lot to improve the sense of empathy.