How do you really know how someone else, with different upbringing and life experiences thinks and feels? How can empathy be cultivated? It is not easy. Respect lies in the heart of a good man, and empathy lies at the heart of respect. In order to cultivate a healthy understanding and appreciation for difference, we must learn to view the world through others' eyes, feel their experience, walk in their shoes.
One of many ways that schools can help cultivate empathy is through inventive programming that enables students to see the world through different lenses, to become the "other." Our third graders have been stepping into the shoes of immigrants as they learn about immigration in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
They visit Ellis Island and the Tenement Museum, and work with our art history partners from the New-York Historical Society on a collage and letter writing project that explores immigrants' emotions and experiences. The unit culminates with a role-playing activity in which the boys assume the identity of an immigrant seeking admittance to the country in the early 20th century. They go through "processing" at a mock Ellis Island and are either admitted or detained.
Through all of these activities, not only do the boys learn the facts and history about immigration, but they also have the opportunity to experience a bit of what immigrants faced.
The factors that drove and continue to drive immigration to this country are complex and important for all citizens to consider, explore, and reflect upon deliberately, and with respect. Through this unit, our boys learn to assume the perspective of "the other" and to switch the perspective from which they normally view the world--a foundation of empathy.
