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Anna Toom, Touro University, United StatesAbstract
The concept of “empathic understanding” was introduced to pedagogy by Carl Rogers, a prominent clinical and educational psychologist, for naming one of the necessary qualities determining the teachers’ competence. The author’s work is devoted to studying this ability in today’s teachers. In our research, 60 graduate students, current schoolteachers, participated. They all attended the author’s online course, Child Development and Learning in Cultural Context, in 2023. As one of the homework assignments, they were asked to read a passage from N. Nosov’s novella about a ten-year-old boy struggling to solve a math problem and to interpret the child’s difficulties from the perspective of Leo Vygotsky’s theory studied in the course. The data was collected electronically and analyzed with a simplified content analysis method. According to the results, 57 students (95%) used the correct concepts from Vygotsky’s theory in their answers. However, only 18 students (30%) made a thorough analysis of the child’s problem, and what distinguished them from others was their ability to find adequate textual illustrations of the theoretical concepts they chose. The author concluded that theoretical knowledge, although it contributed to “empathic understanding,” did not determine it. Indicators of the ability studied were a) careful reading and immersion in the text’s content and b) the ability to identify with the story characters. The author’s further efforts will be directed towards increasing the proportion of such practical exercises in child psychology courses. This will help students specializing in education develop the competencies needed for their everyday professional activities.
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Conference: ACP2025Stream: Psychology and Education
This paper is part of the ACP2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Toom A. (2025) Studying the Ability for Empathic Understanding in School Teachers ISSN: 2187-4743 – The Asian Conference on Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences 2025 Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 1-14) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2187-4743.2025.1
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2187-4743.2025.1
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