Design of Inclusive Teaching Practice: Action Research for Empathic Pedagogy

Workshop Presentation
Michal Razer,  Izabel Ramadan,  Hila Katz Berger,  Michal Honig  

How does one design an inclusive teaching practice? How can we create a situation where classroom teachers consider the emotional and social needs of their students and at the same time their own emotional needs, while teaching a particular subject? In the teaching profession, dealing with the “content” of the lesson and the students’ “feelings” are split into two separate issues. As part of our research, we have developed a tool based on reflection-in-action approach. Following Schon's approach to design, the task is to continually generate inclusive teaching, in interaction with students, from the academic, cognitive, emotional, and social “materials” of the situation. At the center of this approach is “Empathic Pedagogy”, in which the teacher sees things from the students’ point of view. Designing these practices provides a response to the tough issues of marginality and social exclusion and will help students feel a sense of belonging within the learning process. The goal of the tool is to promote teachers' awareness of their role as designers of empathic pedagogy in the classroom through practice inquiry. This is based on the connection between the content learned and the feelings of both students and teacher in a given teaching-learning interaction. In order to become designers, a teacher's peer group uses an “empathetic-inquiry" analysis method of short day-to-day classroom situations clips. In the workshop, we illustrate working with the tool and discuss the fundamental questions involved.