26 March 2023
EMPATHY
MA Professional Masters of Education Project
LEARNING EMPATHY THROUGH VISUAL ART
My PRP research paper was concerned with the influence of the reflective process of art analysis and art creation on the level of empathy of secondary school students. I aimed to investigate to what extent art education influences the empathy of students. Compassion and empathy are noble features, not only in the context of religious values, but as a universal feature, necessary in shaping the personality of a young man. It is an essential element of students’ emotional development, needed in their adult, professional and personal life.
This research project was designed to explore whether second-grade secondary school students can learn empathy using visual art. The findings of the study showed that the use of a reflective process of analysing empathy-related artifacts and creating art by students was a successful method of teaching empathy, and this resulted in an increase in the level of empathy in most of the participating students in my class. As the literature has suggested, there is a special relationship between empathy and the arts, and the JC Visual Art specification provides a suitable platform for using this relationship to teach students empathy among other ethical values. The research produced many interesting qualitative results, which lead to the conclusion, becoming my first recommendation, that it would be great to conduct this project with all the second-grade art students, and maybe even all the JC art students in the school.
