A great deal of my professional life has been in the classroom, using drama strategies to teach curricular content and life skills. I am a huge advocate for the whole-child approach to education: nurturing body, mind and spirit - as if there's any other way (grin). The tricky part is tending to each aspect of a child's growth with specific intention, designing curriculum for the whole child, and for each and every child, that will support multiple intelligences and unique learning styles.
Impossible? Of course not. We have plenty of content, arts and athletics, hands-on projects and so much more. Human beings have been refining education practices since the beginning of time. I do sometimes wonder, after a particularly long day, if the obvious has gotten passed us. This is where my research and eventual connection with Jeremy Rifkin's idea about an Empathetic Civilization started to gel with my own sense of wonder.
The Empathic Civilization
Are we, as a human race, empathetic by nature? In fact, does research actually reflect (pun intended) the way we learn our world and engage in it? I believe the answer to that is YES! Empathy is in the hard drive! Any story of our beginnings as a human family involves duplication. I'm far from being a scientist, though I will say: concept of mirror neurons makes total sense to me.
Creative drama and improvisation games include a standard pairs game called "Mirrors." Two players face each other. One is the leader. The other follows each movement the leader makes, as if in mirror image. The side coach requests slow movements by the leaders, allowing the follower to achieve a believable sameness in the study of other. The leadership changes halfway through the game, so both players experience leading and following (important lesson for all humans, don't cha think? ) I've always loved the essential fun of this activity, as do young ones. It's clear. It makes sense. Because deep within us, we gravitate to those aspects of humanness that are like our own, a wiring that sets up our innate ability to empathize.
I would categorize myself as a non-conformist. Only child, creative type, extravert - perhaps even irritated at a young age by other kids needing to be like each other. Although, as I reflect back, I was like my clan: family first, then theatre kids, on and on. But I always craved uniqueness. Truth is, in that way, we ARE all alike. We need to reflect the ways we belong to each other (the human race) and we need to find our "snowflake selves" - that which makes us unique.
To be educated, one must engage the givens in order to acquire that which is yet to learn. That is to say, what we already know helps us know more. What I wonder about is whether we take time to reflect on our givens - do we teach ourselves about ourselves as effectively as we could? The arts are a huge step forward in any classroom, allowing us to learn through our imaginations, promoting unique expression and coordinated group skills, among a long list of assets. While I believe empathy skills come from arts education - of course, of course - I also know well that arts programs (sadly) are not in every classroom, every day. These are among the first programs to cut when funding is lost. (If I ran the world, all forms of arts education would be primary; everything else would be afforded as budget would allow.)
Empathy training, perhaps, could blur the separation between curricular and extra-curricular. It is social study, science, story, kinesthetic, spatial, visual, expressive and imaginative. It is a given in the most complicated math problem. We all have it, yet there seems to be unnecessary mystery about what it is and how to use it. The critical nature of understanding each other, putting one's self in the circumstances of another: utilizing the imagination, as the arts do, to know self and other better - is as critical to humanity as water and air.
Using an array of art forms and the (required) content of being human (grin), I'm working on an empathy curriculum. Feel free to share your ideas. I'll be posting quite a bit on this subject. Empathy is the essential skill to the act of being compassionate. All times are compassionary times.
Peace,
Jean
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