Where We Are: Understanding Instructor Perceptions of Empathy in Engineering Education

Abstract

Empathy is a necessary soft skill for 21st century engineers that can support engineering design, creativity, ethical skills, and collaboration. Empathy-based pedagogical research has predominantly focused on course or project-specific approaches. This paper presents instructor (n = 40) perceptions on empathy as a professional skill and as a pedagogical area captured in a survey distributed to the Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo. Instructors identified empathy as a moderately to extremely important professional skill but expressed a wider range of opinions on the importance of empathy-based pedagogy ranging from not at all important to extremely important. This difference in perceptions may be connected to self-identified gender, professional engineering status, and perceived connections between empathy and a wider range of graduate attributes. Future work will focus on a qualitative analysis of survey statements to better understand the broader context of instructor perceptions and developing a larger multi-institution study.

Teacher Empathy in an engineering classroom: Exploring the growth in perception of Teacher Empathy through the journey of three engineering faculty members

“…If we take a systems perspective of empathy in engineering education, most previous research focuses on students and we overlook the faculty member and their empathetic skill development (Araya & Martin, 2022). While some of the research explores the faculty members' perspectives on empathy, these studies focus on the need for developing students empathy skills and not faculty members' empathetic skills (Howcraft & Mercer, 2022; Strobel et al, 2013). In higher education, researchers from fields like medicine, nursing, and psychology have tried to understand the concept of Teacher Empathy and its effects in the classroom and education (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Mikkonen et al, 2015).…”