When Caring Counts: Fostering Empathy and Compassion Through the Arts Using Animation

The over-protection of children and a sense of student entitlement may constrain their ability to develop empathy and compassion (Lukianoff and Haidt, The Atlantic, 316:42–52, 2015). The rise of virtual online experiences, while offering the benefits of participating in an online community, may exacerbate the disconnection that is fostered by a spectator culture whose participants are to some extent removed from real-life experiences. There is evidence that the commodification of education can diminish the role of human relationships, and that the Arts, as non-high-stakes-tested subjects, continue to be marginalised in a curriculum that teachers perceive as overcrowded. Despite their intentions to build students’ resilience and capacity for creative risk taking, educators may be constrained by expectations to spoon-feed information to their students and rigidly scaffold learning tasks. The Arts, as a powerful means of storytelling, remind us that our stories interconnect and offer immersive experiences in embodying and enacting co-constructed knowledge. Rich integrated tasks using an Arts Immersion approach can awaken empathy and compassion in learners and teachers, leading to transformational learning experiences in primary school classrooms. An example which provides evidence that this approach is effective in restoring the importance of human relationships to the curriculum is the Claymation project, Maristely’s Story.