What is teacher empathy in engineering education? A review of the literature
- Conference
- Location
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Minneapolis, MN
- Publication Date
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August 23, 2022
- Start Date
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June 26, 2022
- End Date
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June 29, 2022
- Conference Session
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Student Division Technical 4: Student Experience & Competencies
- Page Count
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12
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--40675
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/40675
- Download Count
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341
Paper Authors
Camila Olivero Araya The Ohio State University
Camila received her B.S. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, en Chile. She is now at the Ohio State University, where she is beginning her PhD in Engineering Education, with an emphasis on Teacher empathy.
Julie Martin The Ohio State University
Julie P. Martin is a Fellow of ASEE and an associate professor of Engineering Education at The Ohio State University. Julie’s professional mission is to create environments that elevate and expand the research community. She is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, where her vision is to create a culture of constructive peer review in academic publishing. Julie is a former NSF program director for engineering education and frequently works with faculty to help them write proposals and navigate the proposal preparation and grant management processes. She was a 2009 NSF CAREER awardee for her work operationalizing social capital for engineering education. More recently, Julie has encouraged the engineering education research community to embrace methodological activism, a paradigm whereby researchers intentionally choose methods for the political purpose of empowering marginalized populations. Learn more about her research team, Elevate, at juliepmartin.com.
Abstract
This study reviews the literature on teacher empathy. Our purpose in doing so is to develop a preliminary understanding teacher empathy and showing the evidence necessary for developing future research on teacher empathy in engineering education. This literature review was conducted in two phases. First, works from non-engineering disciplines were reviewed to identify popular threads and major areas of research related to teacher empathy. This phase was meant to establish specific themes of importance derived from the larger body of literature on teacher empathy. Second, a literature review identified engineering-specific research on teacher empathy. The results indicated that the term “teacher empathy” is infrequently applied in an engineering education context. Yet, in others educational disciplines the definition of teacher empathy involves cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. According to the findings, empathy in education plays a critical role in developing teacher-student relationships and positively impacting students' learning. Finally, we suggest that it would be beneficial to characterize teacher empathy in the engineering field and recommend employing a qualitative research approach to study how engineering faculty understand the role of teacher empathy, how students understand teacher empathy, the potential barriers to demonstrating teacher empathy to students, and how teacher empathy impacts student success.
Olivero Araya, C., & Martin, J. (2022, August), What is teacher empathy in engineering education? A review of the literature Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40675
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