Emotional development in schools is integral to the way that students develop academically, and it also sets them up to be responsible, caring citizens once they reach adulthood. Not only that, but having the ability to empathize with others has been shown to reduce aggression in problem children and reduce incidences of bullying in school.
It’s a notion that educator and author Mary Gordon is intimately familiar with. As the founder and executive director of Roots of Empathy, she’s devoted the past two decades to teaching children empathy — specifically by exposing them to babies.
And she’s been wildly successful.
Since its founding in Canada in 1996, the nonprofit has expanded to serve K-8 students in 11 countries, including the U.S., where it’s been established in five states and the District of Columbia. On its surface, the program is simple: It comprises 27 lessons, based around the monthly visits of a volunteer parent, his or her infant, and a Roots of Empathy-trained instructor. With the babies as their “teachers,” the children observe how the parent and the baby interact, and how Mom or Dad responds to the baby’s emotions and needs.
Students learn to identify with the baby’s perspective and how to recognize and label the tiny tot’s feelings. They then become increasingly able to apply that learning to themselves, leading to a better understanding of their own feelings as well as the feelings of their peers.
“What we do know and what the teachers know is that the children really do learn to understand the alphabet of their emotions. And even better, they are able to talk about how they feel,” Gordon tells NationSwell.
And that can translate into a 50 percent reduction in the number of children who pick fights in the classroom.
Other research has confirmed those findings. A study in Northern Ireland showed that kids in a Roots of Empathy program saw improved social behaviors, such as positive communication with other students, and a reduction in “difficult” behavior. Likewise, in a 2005 study by the University of Missouri, researchers found a link between Roots of Empathy’s program and “particularly strong evidence for its potential to reduce aggression and violence.”
The point of the program isn’t to single out specific problem kids prone to bullying, but instead approach the classroom as a whole.
“It’s not medicine; it’s vitamins, and we all need vitamins,” Gordon says. “If you offer a universal program, you head off a lot of trouble, and it’s a benefit that we head off aggression and bullying.”
In their work, the Harvard researchers Jennifer Kahn and Richard Weissbourd have similarly found that the best way to reduce bullying is not by attempting to correct the behavior of one individual, but rather to foster an inclusive, caring school environment. Blogging for HuffPost, Kahn and Weissbourd wrote of their research that “in schools where students reported having more empathy, students also reported fewer experiences of bullying and were more likely to try to stop bullying. Students who reported more empathy also reported fewer experiences of discrimination, threats to physical safety, teasing, and bullying at school.”
Despite the promising research, the U.S. has been slow to implement empathy-based programming and instead leans on punishing alleged bullies — as was the case in Florida earlier this year when two 12-year-old middle school students were charged with cyberstalking after the suicide of one of their classmates.
Gordon says that’s the wrong approach, and the solution lies in building strong connections between students and their peers.
While Roots of Empathy continues to rapidly expand — its program has been implemented in countries as diverse as New Zealand, Germany and Costa Rica — growing it in the U.S. has been more difficult, where a premium is put on standardized tests and grades.
“Here’s the biggest issue in the U.S., is people say to me, ‘I don’t want the program unless it can raise academic scores this year.’ And they say, ‘I’m sorry, it sounds wonderful, but I’ve got to deliver,’” Gordon says. “Obviously we want all children to get an education and a job, but at what cost?”
Seattle was the first U.S. city to adopt the Roots of Empathy model during the 2007-08 school year; today, more than 15,000 children there have gone through the program. Though specific research has yet to measure the efficacy of Seattle’s program, educators have said it’s made a dramatic difference.
“Roots of Empathy provides a unique way to bring out compassion and tenderness in students,” one teacher wrote to Seattle’s Child in 2015. “For kids, Roots of Empathy is a respite from the day-to-day realities of school, and helps them deal with the difficulties and challenges in their home lives, as well. The visits are a breath of fresh air, giving kids a break from the work of academic learning and interactions with peers.”
Melissa Soltani, program manager for Roots of Empathy in Seattle, says that she knew the program was effective after a student confided in her that he had been harboring suicidal thoughts.
“He said he was trying to strangle himself with his belt in the bathroom,” Soltani says. “It was at that moment when I realized that we were creating space to be comfortable and share that with someone.”
And that’s exactly what Gordon is working to implement in more cities and states, if not the entire world.
“This is our solution to building a caring, peaceful and civil society: through children,” she says.
Tag: Empathy
5 Virtual Reality Projects That Will Change How You View the World
In 1915, two decades after the first commercial film premiered, American audiences packed cinemas to see “The Birth of a Nation,” a three-hour, silent epic directed by D.W. Griffith. The story of racial tensions during Reconstruction demonized intermarriage and championed the Ku Klux Klan as guardians of white women’s chastity. The nation’s first blockbuster, the movie gained popularity for reflecting contemporary fears of racial inclusivity; it possibly even exacerbated prejudices.
If one of the first major experiments in the new medium of film ended up with such a retrograde product, what should we expect from this century’s emerging medium, virtual reality? By immersing viewers in another world, as opposed to the passive experience of watching a movie, virtual reality’s storytelling has the potential to change our moral point of view. If Griffith’s century-old film mythologized men in white sheets, could VR help us see beyond our skin color?
That, essentially, is the goal. But as with most mediums, especially one that removes us from our surroundings, there’s always the danger of escapism in to fantasy. NationSwell examined five recent works (sometimes called “sims” or “experiences”) to see if filmmakers have found a new way to generate empathy.
1. Embracing Our Differences
Nonny de la Peña is sometimes referred to as the “godmother of virtual reality.” At Emblematic Group, the VR company she founded a decade ago in Santa Monica, Calif., de la Peña brought the genre of “immersive journalism” (often pairing real sound with low-budget digital animations) to the mainstream with her short project “Hunger in Los Angeles,” which recreated the experience of waiting on line at a Skid Row food bank. Later films took viewers to a Syrian refugee camp and the Mexican border. This year, at the Sundance Film Festival, she debuted her most recent, “Out of Exile: Daniel’s Story,” about an LGBT youth coming out to his disapproving family. De la Peña, a former Newsweek correspondent, believes that VR can make viewers feel in a way no other artistic medium can. “If you feel like you’re there, then you feel like it could happen to you, too,” she recently told Los Angeles Magazine.
2. Adopting Another Perspective
For the last two years, Specular Theory’s “Perspective” series, which premiered at Sundance in 2015, has been showing how social cues can be misinterpreted very quickly. Playing two sides back-to-back, the narratives by Rose Troche and Morris May show varying perspectives on a crime. In the first chapter, “The Party,” about sexual assault, a man and woman meet at an alcohol-soaked college kegger. Gina, the girl, passes out, too intoxicated; Brian, the boy, has sex with her anyway. This year, “The Misdemeanor” doubled the number of perspectives around a fictional officer-involved shooting in Brooklyn to four: a teenager who’s shot, his brother and two cops. “Who will approach the piece and only watch one thing and think that they have the story?” Troche said to Wired. “That’s pretty much what we have in real life. The piece demonstrates the fact that just because you’re there, doesn’t mean you see everything. Through the four strings, you get to see the full picture.”
3. Contemplating the Bigger Picture
The Wevr-produced film “Hard World for Small Things,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016, likewise tackles police brutality. In the five-minute story, director Janicza Bravo, a black woman, retells a deeply personal story from her own life. In 1999, while on vacation from her native Panama, a cousin had been killed in Brooklyn while holding a bag of coke. After looking up the event, all Bravo could find were short write-ups in local newspapers. Bravo’s film goes beyond that brevity to capture a whole life, leading up to its final moments. “What if their lives were more than a couple of paragraphs; what if it was their friends, where they were going, what they had read, what they had desired, etc. I wanted to make a short piece that was emotionally longer than a paragraph, and that you got a slice of his life before he died. So when he died, it’s not about the event and what he did to have died; it becomes about who he was, his humor, his laugh,” Bravo has said. For her new sim, she transposed the story to a mini-mart in South Los Angeles, where police mistake someone’s identity and fire at him with questionable cause.
4. Respecting Animals and Nature
Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab is bringing the rigors of academia to VR. At the university’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., professor Jeremy Bailenson, the lab’s director, tests whether virtual reality can improve all life by making viewers more empathetic, more aware of the need for environmental conservation and more communicative. Essentially, he wonders, can visualizing the effects of our behavior change our actions? In one sim, a headset-equipped viewer grabs a chainsaw and cuts down a tree in a forest. In another film, after a person gets down on all fours and straps on the VR goggles, they become a cow grazing in a pasture before being driven to a slaughterhouse. It might just be enough for you to think twice about loading paper into a printer or ordering beef for dinner.
5. Putting Personal Responsibility in the Driver’s Seat
Even the lowly PSA is going virtual, too. Reel FX and AT&T’s recent commercial simulates the consequences of distracted driving. In “It Can Wait,” a person places her hand on a wheel before the simulation starts. She motors around a neighborhood while texting, barely avoiding bikers, swerving cars and schoolchildren in the crosswalk. As you can guess, the experience ends in tragedy. “Although people admit that such behavior is terrible and that they do it, they don’t necessarily see themselves as part of the problem. What people are doing is rationalizing that there is a safe way to do it,” Michelle Kuckelman, executive director of brand management at AT&T, told USA Today. By experiencing the film, participants get to see the danger from afar, while still catching a glimpse of disaster up close.
Continue reading “5 Virtual Reality Projects That Will Change How You View the World”
Can the Use of Virtual Reality Reduce Racial Bias?
How can you change a person’s view of race? Try changing the color of his or her own skin.
Researchers discovered that making white people feel that they are wearing brown skin is associated with a decrease in racial bias. Researchers Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakiris write in Trends in Cognitive Science, “Ownership of an outgroup body has been found to be associated with a significant reduction in implicit biases against that outgroup.”
How did researchers convince study participants that they were in an “outgroup” or minority body?
In the first technique — the “Rubber Hand Illusion” — participants watched a screen that showed a brown-skinned rubber hand being touched while their own hands were touched in a similar way. In the second, called the “Enfacement Illusion,” white participants watched a video in which the face of a dark-skinned person was being stroked with cotton, while having their own faces touched in a similar fashion. In both of these scenarios, test subjects showed signs of reduced racial biases.
In the third experiment, “Full Body Illusions,” participants played virtual reality computer games in which their avatars either had brown, white or purple skin. Those that played the game with brown-skinned avatars demonstrated reduced bias against black people in a subsequent test, while those who’d played the game with white or purple skin showed no change.
Researcher Slater tells the Huffington Post, “Generally using these techniques, it is possible to give two sides of a conflict an experience of what it is like to be a member of the ‘other side,’ This should help to build empathy.”
Unfortunately, real world applications have yet to be developed. But in light of all the recent civil unrest in this country, organizations such as police departments and schools could definitely benefit from these findings and any subsequent usage of them — leaving a lasting impact on this nation.
MORE: Why Every American Should Read Harry Potter
Why Every American Should Read Harry Potter
Can reading a fantasy story about a British kid with glasses who befriends half-giants, house elves, goblins and mudbloods (aka wizards whose parents have no powers themselves) lead to greater kindness toward minority groups facing discrimination?
Turns out, it can.
New research suggests that reading J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books correlates with less prejudice among young people toward minority groups, including immigrants and homosexuals, and a greater ability to understand their perspectives.
The research comprised three separate studies. In the first, a team led by Loris Vezzali of the University of Modena gathered 34 Italian fifth graders and assessed them on their attitudes toward immigrants through a questionnaire. For six weeks, they met in groups of five or six with a researcher to discuss passages from “Harry Potter.”
Some groups read passages pertaining to prejudice, while others read sections about a different topic. After that, researchers interviewed the kids about the extent of their Pottermania (to determine how many of the books they’d read and movies they’d seen) and asked whether or not they identified with Harry and wanted to be like him. Kids who identified with Harry and read passages pertaining to prejudice showed “improved attitudes toward immigrants,” the researchers write.
Another study found that high school students who identified with Harry (as opposed to the villian Voldemort) were less likely to show prejudice against gay people. And a third study focusing on college students in England discovered that those who did not relate to Voldemort were more likely to have accepting attitudes toward immigrants.
So in the melting pot that is America, it’s easy to use these findings to make our country a little bit better. After all, these studies demonstrate that we don’t need magic to reduce prejudice and racism and increase empathy. Instead, all that’s required is a library card (and a magical wizard to read about).
MORE: Can Reading A Book Make You A Better Person?
Can a Book Make You a Better Person?
Several recent studies have suggested that reading fiction can improve a person’s capacity for empathy, which gave Roman Krznaric, the author of “Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution,” an idea. Why not start an online library filled with books and movies that teach empathy to their readers and viewers?
Krznaric writes on the blog StartEmpathy.Org, “I wanted to create a place where anybody, anywhere in the world, could find the best resources for helping us escape from the narrow confines of our own experiences and enter the realities of different cultures, generations, and lives.”
So he launched the Empathy Library, where users can recommend and rate the books and movies that have moved them and caused them to empathize with other people. It isn’t actually a library where patrons can check out or download books and movies, but rather a resource for people to use if they want to find stories that can help develop empathy. Kznaric quotes British novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”
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Can Writing Poetry Make Better Doctors?
With teaching gigs at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, you would’t think Dr. Rafael Campo would have time for much else. But he’s also a poet with six published volumes to his credit, and he’s on a mission to combine his two passions. Campo believes teaching medical students to study and write poetry can imbue their work with more compassion, balancing the emphasis he feels medical schools place on teaching students to distance themselves from their patients. Campo runs a writing workshop every week for students and residents. “Sometimes facts become all-consuming in our work as docs and we may risk losing sight of some of the truths of the experience of illness, particularly from the perspective of our patients,” Campo said in a recent workshop attended by Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour. Campo described a typical moment of loss that he witnesses in his practice: “The family is sitting by the bedside. The patient hasn’t survived the arrhythmia. Don’t we still have a role as healers there?” Poet or not, it’s hard to argue with that.
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Give Video Games a Chance to Help Kids Develop Positive Traits
While violent video games draw a lot of criticism, scrutiny, and blame for harmful effects on kids who play them excessively, some modern video game developers are finding ways to engage kids and help them develop positive personality traits. Trip Hawkins, who founded Electronic Arts, is working to get beyond the typical game and his company’s best known brand, EA Sports. He wants to transform gaming platforms into teaching tools. Using the company’s wealth of data, research, and experience in developing highly-engaging games, Electronic Arts created a game called If, in which players visit an imaginary village, populated by cats and dogs who don’t get along. The progressive difficulty of the game creates an opportunity to learn empathy and solve challenges of interpersonal relationships. If EA can master the art of making this learning process fun for kids, it could change the value and benefits of playing video games.