Blog

Welcome to the Engaging Empathy blog! We are so excited to connect with a community of educators exploring empathy and art. It feels especially fitting to launch our blog on World Values Day, an annual celebration to explore our values and share them with others. The values challenge and other activities at worldvaluesday.com are fun, easy ways to build a stronger classroom community, and we hope you’ll check them out.

Engaging Empathy represents the work of our 2019 William Reese Company Teacher Fellowship. The fellowship was designed to generate interdisciplinary curriculum connected with American art and another subject (we chose English Language Arts) by using materials from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's rare books, archives, and art collection. During our fellowship, we created over 25 lessons aligned to ten different empathy topics while enjoying some of the most beautiful views a museum has to offer.

While the Engaging Empathy website offers all of our Teacher’s Guides with lesson procedures, art slides, and graphic organizers, we started the blog as a way to highlight a lesson or two at a time. In the upcoming weeks, we look forward to recognizing National Disability Employment Awareness Month with one of our favorite texts from Anne Lamott and honoring Native American Heritage Month featuring the art of Jeffrey Gibson (a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, an award often called the “genius grant”). Inspired by the #sparkkindess campaign with Jennifer Garner, one of our favorite actresses, and Wal-Mart, based right here in Bentonville, we will share ways to celebrate World Kindness Day.

Sometimes the blog will expand on the Engaging Empathy lessons as we explore new topics and share educators we admire, organizations we support, writers we love, and art we could discuss all day.

In honor of World Values Day, we’re highlighting a lesson to introduce students to empathy. You can complete all of the activities in one class, and they never fail to engage students and generate discussion.

Each year, we begin our lessons by watching Brené Brown's On Empathy, then sketch noting Roman Krznaric’s “How to Start an Empathy Revolution: Roman Krznaric at TEDxAthens 2013”. If you’ve never used sketchnotes before, the YouTube tutorials “What is sketchnoting?” and "Basic Sketchnote Tips" are helpful.

In upcoming blogs, we will share ideas for expanding your empathy exploration. We’d love to hear from you as you begin your classroom empathy journey! Let us know how it goes.

--Heather & Julie