Özet:

Empathy is of great importance in developing better relationships among individuals and societies. Yet, empathy is not involved in the national curriculum as a skill needs to be developed in the Social Studies and Citizenship courses. Therefore, a number of empathetic roles were presented to a group of the primary school pupils (aged 7-8). Then they were requested to draw pictures representing their thinking and feelings concerning the social issue that they chose. The reason for asking them to draw a picture to express themselves was due to the potential limitations concerning their writing skills. After drawings were completed, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 15 of them in order to provide them an opportunity to express their empathetic reasonings and feelings orally. In the paper, examples from students’ drawings and related interview excerpts are presented in order to describe and evaluate the empathy process in which students were involved. Keywords : Empathy, drawings, social studies, citizenship, teaching

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