I plan to participate in the 4th annual?Global Education Conference?to be held November 18th to the 22nd. And I encourage you to do so as well. The event is described as:
...a collaborative, inclusive, world-wide community initiative involving students, educators, and organizations at all levels. It is designed to significantly increase opportunities for building education-related connections around the globe while supporting cultural awareness and recognition of diversity. Last year?s conference featured 400 general sessions and 20 keynote addresses from all over the world with over 13,000 participant logins.
In my work with international schools, I've come to realize we all have more challenges in common than challenges that are unique to us. ?Among those challenges is identifying with any degree of certainty what skills and dispositions our students must develop and master for career and personal fulfillment.
Skills - in math, in reading, in writing - and basic content area facts - in history, in literature, in science, in government - get a lot of attention. These "hard" skills have been taught for a long time and are fairly easy to measure on objective tests. Happily problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and information-fluency are increasingly mentioned as well.
But I would argue that without attention to soft skills, whether we call them dispositions or habits of mind or right brain skills?- the hard skills aren't much good except in helping one pass a test. And the "soft skill" that I've been think a lot about lately is empathy - the ability to see a situation from another person's point of view. In engaging with a global community, the difficulty level of being empathetic correlates?directly to the degree of difference between oneself and another person culturally and geographically. (In other words, the more different we are, the tougher it is to get into each other's heads.)
Empathy is too often thought of as a feel-good, let's all join hands and sing, multicultural tolerance,?respect and appreciation, and even, perhaps, a subtle?form of cultural snobbery. But anyone who looks down on empathy as a means of simply being a ?nicer person is sadly mistaken.?
The ability to genuinely understand what others need, value, respect, and fear is critical to business, political, and personal success.
I am giving myself until November 18th to learn enough about it so I can leave anyone attending my session "confused at a higher level."
Your Name and Title: Doug Johnson, Director of Media and Technology
School or Organization Name: Mankato Area Public Schools
Co-Presenter Name(s):
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): All
Short Session Description (one line): I will discuss concrete ways of helping students look at situations through the eyes of those who are different from them, building the critical skill of empathy for global relations and success in today's world.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like): Walking a Mile in Another's?Moccasins: Purposefully Developing Empathy. This session will define empathy and describe how it is critical to building successful relationships - business, political, and personal - in a global community. Several concrete suggestions with examples for building empathic abilities in students (and in ourselves) will be discussed.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: https://dougjohnson.wikispaces.com/Empathy
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