2. Use empathy to combat bias.
Helping young children form strong emotional ties at school helps them understand that they are connected to other people, even when they’re faced with differences, according to pre-kindergarten teacher Dana Frantz Bentley, who is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Lesley.
Kids enter school, Dr. Bentley explains, asking questions about how the world works and what their place in it might be.
“The answer is that we are all deeply connected through being human. We all have families; our families are all different. We all love to play, we like to play different things. The empathy piece, this sense of connectedness, is something that you start building at the very beginning of a school year with small things. And once you build that community, it makes space for difference.”
Bentley believes that making space for kids to engage in discussion with people who have different backgrounds or beliefs helps them engage with questions around differences and diversity later in life.
“When you’re five, it’s ‘you love spaghetti, and I hate spaghetti—how can you be my friend?’ And it really evolves, even on a pre-K level, into ‘wait—I believe in God and you say there’s no God.’ These are the things that happen at the lunch table.”
The structure of that conversation can apply to a wide range of topics, she observes.
“Sometimes we’re having conversations about gender and pronouns and sometimes it’s about whether it’s really okay to put water in the sand table.”
3. How music and literature can help you teach empathy.
How can classroom educators teach empathy?
“It can be as simple as picking the right piece of literature to read aloud to students and talking about the characters and what they might have been thinking or feeling at that moment,” says Patricia Crain de Galarce. “‘If you were the mouse in the story, how would you have felt?’ You’re just asking kids to step outside of their own experience and take in a perspective other than their own.”
During his years of consulting and working with educators, the most powerful tool David Levine found was a song called “Howard Gray,” written by musician Lee Domann. The lyrics describe Domann’s memories of a childhood classmate who was being bullied, and his own lifelong remorse at having joined in. Levine found that performing the song with a classroom of children opened up conversations like nothing else—about bullying and being bullied, about being an uneasy bystander or wanting to do better.
“The song was the magic. I would walk into a classroom and all I knew was that I was going to sing the song and let the kids drive the experience. One day I wanted to take a deeper dive and I said ‘Who’s ever felt this way? Who’s got a story to tell?’ And they all wanted to tell their story. It became a bias awareness session; it became a diversity session; it became empathy.”
4. Create a more democratic school environment.
For Dana Frantz Bentley, empathy is a crucial element in creating what she calls “a democratic classroom” where children feel empowered to engage with each other rather than rely on the teacher to set rules.
“You start with smaller things, like the sand table or who gets the double bikes on the playground,” she says. “And then over time, that practice holds the bigger issues like gender or race.”