The empathy year by Sarah Mears
As we enter 2024, imagine how different this year would be if empathy was placed front and centre in all our actions and interactions with others. EmpathyLab is a charitable social enterprise collaborating with schools and libraries and those living and working with children and young people. Our vision is to raise an empathy educated generation. A generation who knows the importance of understanding other people’s feelings and who consciously put their empathy skills into action. Happier, more resilient young people who go on to be society’s fantastic future employees, citizens, parents and play a vital role in combatting the hatred and prejudice that tears societies apart.
Our work is built around two evidence-based concepts – that empathy is a skill that can be learned and strengthened through practice and that reading builds empathy. When we read and we are transported into stories, we can feel empathy for characters, almost as if they are real people and the empathy we feel for book characters can be transferred to actual situations.
We focus on developing four empathy skills
· Building children’s emotional vocabulary
· Practising empathic communication (and in particular listening)
· Encouraging perspective taking
· Pro-social behaviours that lead to social action.
For us the start of the calendar year is also the start of the empathy year, a time when we look ahead to key moments where we can highlight the importance of empathy in young people’s social and emotional development.
Significantly our year starts with a major focus on books. Every February we introduce a new Read for Empathy book collection. This year it launches on 8 February. The collection contains 65 recently published titles, 25 secondary and 40 primary. Books are submitted for consideration in the previous year and a team of twelve judges – teachers, librarians and children’s book experts assess them against a set of empathy criteria which includes:
· high quality writing/illustrations
· expertly crafted characters
· books that challenge tribal thinking focusing on building understanding between individuals and communities
· books that support the development of key empathy skills such as perspective-taking
· content that offers insight into current key empathy issues: e.g. refugees, homelessness, loneliness and challenging life circumstances
· authenticity of the writing: e.g. through lived experience or particularly in-depth research
We work actively to shape a collection that is diverse in terms of content, authors and illustrators, genres and publishers.
Discover more about the Read for Empathy collections at https://www.empathylab.uk/RFE
The publication of the collection also marks the start of the annual countdown to Empathy Day on June 6. Empathy Day itself is an online Festival with authors and illustrators exploring the power of empathy by showcasing their involvement in the ‘Mission Empathy’ challenge. We are also encouraging children in schools and families to join the challenge in the run-up to Empathy Day. ‘Mission Empathy’ contains a range of empathy-boosting fun and thought-provoking activities for children, all of which promote reading for empathy, connecting with others and then putting empathy into action. The activities include setting up an empathy bookshelf and sharing fabulous empathy reads through an empathy powerpose, creating emotions maps, becoming an empathy spotter and making an empathy resolution. Empathy Day toolkits available from March, will provide ways to run ‘Mission Empathy’ in schools and libraries, for example by setting up ‘Mission Empathy’ stations all around the school library.
The final session on Empathy Day is always all about empathy resolutions. Children who practice empathy and see themselves as empathetic individuals are more likely to respond empathically in future situations1. Individuals, whole classes and families as well as authors and illustrators will all be making their resolutions on Empathy Day. Resolutions don’t have to be big, even the smallest, changes can make a big difference, but they must be do-able and they need to be generated by stepping into the shoes of others and using that insight to know what you could do to improve their lives. So, the third element of our empathy year is Empathy Action Month which takes place in November and is a time to revisit those resolutions and even make new ones.
If you are interested in finding out more about the work of Empathy Lab across the year, please do look at our Affiliate Schools Programme https://www.empathylab.uk/schools-programme or join one of our training events coming up in February and April 2024 to help you make the most of the Read for Empathy Collection and to learn more about Empathy Day. https://www.empathylab.uk/our-foundation-empathy-programme
But of course every day should be an empathy day, there’s no need to wait until June or November to make an empathy resolution. The new year is a time of resolutions so please do start by making your own empathy resolutions now, consider taking part in our empathy activities this year and join our mailing list to keep in touch. https://www.empathylab.uk/get-involved
1 Borba, Michelle UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World, Touchstone; 2017