INTRODUCINGA PEDAGOGY OF EMPATHIC ACTIONAS INFORMED BY SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS
ANITA THERESA NOWAK
Department of Integrated Studies in Education McGill University
June 30, 2011
"2.1 Defining empathy
In colloquial terms, empathy is understood to mean ‘putting oneself in someone’s shoes’ or ‘seeing through someone else’s eyes.’ But to empathy researchers, the word is “rife with divergence and disagreement” (Schertz, 2004, p. 11) and suffers from a “definitional morass” (Stephan & Finlay, 1999, p. 730), stemming largely from disparate philosophical and epistemological orientations (Davis, 1995). As Van Baaren (2009) puts it: “Although most people intuitively ‘feel’ what empathy means, its scientific study has a turbulent past colored by a remarkable disagreement about its definition” (p. 31). Moreover, while “individual scholarly accounts of the phenomenon generate the impression of coherent agreement on what empathy is… the pattern across these writings reveals striking differences” (Verducci, 2000, p. 63). One need only consider the plethora of definitions advanced below to appreciate this point. "