The Empathetic-Altruistic Classroom

Mini Mission Statement:

• Meeting the diverse needs of our learners while teaching about the culturally diverse world around us.

• Instilling an empathetic and altruistic culture in our classrooms and school by cross-curricular teaming while implementing relevant texts, questions, and activities that have real-world connections that also reflect our learners’ own lives.

Past Discussions/Focus:

• Ways to make content areas interdisciplinary

  • LA and Social: Social studies regions of the world, Language reads stories of the people, life, and culture of those regions.

• Multiculturalism refers to the "sharing of many cultures."  Interdisciplinary classrooms have the opportunity to share diverse cultures together, much like multiculturalism.

• Diverse texts and resources helps learners recognize the similarities and differences amongst people.

  • Interdisciplinary studies will help learners also recognize the similarities and differences amongst content areas, skills, and strategies.

• Empathy is the capacity for one to infuse themselves with another’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Recognizing similarities and differences amongst people, along with education about different cultures, will help instill empathy.

Future Vision:

• To have interdisciplinary teaming amongst grades 6, 7, and 8 to provide:

  • Common language and expectations that nurture a diverse culture

  • Opportunities for learners to explore and empathize with a wide variety of different cultures

  • Texts that learners can see their own reflections in

• Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis (Batson, 2010): Empathic concern produces altruistic motivation.

  • Empathic concern: other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need.

  • Altruistic motivation: a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare.