Designed for Success

Empathy development takes practice - and building children’s empathy requires adult-facilitated intervention. Building on previous pilot success, the proposed project will establish a content and delivery model for cross-cultural collaborative learning experiences at the intersections of STEM and social-emotional learning (SEL), affirming that every student and community has a lot to learn and a lot to share - and that constructive engagement across markers of difference and via empathy-grounded STEM pathways is not only possible, but incredibly valuable. 

With subtle cultural relevance and language medium tweaks, the proposed solution will be scalable in synchronous or asynchronous contexts worldwide, after learnings have been incorporated, helping Empatico leverage empathy as crucial common ground for the collective transformation humankind so urgently needs to upend environmental degradation, racism, inequity, and other complex societal problems we face.

COVID-19 upended the education systems and social experiences of some 1.5 billion learners aged 18 and younger, tragically exacerbating pre-existing patterns of inequality and inequity. While students (and teachers!) have shown incredible resilience, the social-emotional and relational impacts of the pandemic have been intense, and connection, inclusion, and empathy must be front-and-center as learning communities seek to heal and move forward.  

The team at Empatico believes young learners everywhere should develop empathy and communication skills that will allow them to work effectively with others to identify and address complex problems and opportunities in their families, workplaces, and communities. Yet, even before the pandemic, learning environments needed significant reorientation to support creative problem solving, ability to innovate, and critical thinking - key competencies young learners will need to thrive in the 21st century, according to the United Nations. Few schools have mechanisms in place to expose students to perspectives that are unfamiliar, let alone equip them to learn and collaborate constructively with peers who have different socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and cultural backgrounds and ways of knowing. Furthermore, given the innovative potential of science, technology, engineering, and math, it’s particularly troubling that equity gaps are particularly extreme in these disciplines.

Empatico pairs partner classrooms via a matching algorithm, prioritizing social markers of difference (e.g. students’ racial and ethnic identities, % of students eligible for free/reduced price lunch) and providing educators with tools and resources to support virtual learning experiences through which students connect and practice extending empathy. Empatico’s secure platform features live video and message technology, file sharing, and standards-aligned classroom activities. 

We want to tweak the curriculum and exchange model from Empatico’s recently piloted STEM SEL program for a cross-cultural and primarily asynchronous context. Upending K-12 STEM learning norms that have historically prioritized individual-level work and marginalized females and communities of color, the proposed project will connect classrooms in Florida and Nigeria via activities that meaningfully and memorably show young learners that empathy, inclusion, and collaboration are invaluable to problem-solving processes and outcomes.

Through a flexible design thinking challenge that helps learners practice social-emotional skills like self-awareness, respectful communication, perspective taking, and empathy,  students will use a design thinking process to (1) tackle challenges they identify with their partner classroom peers, (2) pitch their best ideas to each other and a wider audience that includes a diverse array of STEM professionals, and (3) reflecting collectively on their learnings.

Self-directed, social-emotional learning pathways are known to increase children’s engagement, and the cross-cultural design thinking tools and engagement model proposed herein will build students’ relational and content knowledge and skills, while demonstrating STEM, empathy, and collaboration as valuable and personally-relevant intersections for reflection, problem solving, and collective wellbeing.   

Empathetic problem solvers recognize others’ shared humanity and seek to understand problems from different points of view, considering not only how the problem affects them, but also how their own background, identity, and experiences might limit or bias how they understand related matters. They also recognize that others’ perspectives and circumstances might lead them to experience, explore, and address the same problem in very different ways. We thus approach STEM as a culture of creative problem solving, through which diverse voices and multiple points of entry often spark fresh, robust solutions to complex concerns and opportunities. After a 45-minute mini-orientation, paired educators in the U.S. and Nigeria will guide their students through approximately 5 hours of classroom collaboration activities designed to affirm the important truth that all of us - irrespective of our differences - can and do make meaning from and contribute to STEM in day-to-day life and decisions small and large. 

TedPrime Hub, an Empatico non-profit partner organization pursuing accessible and equitable quality education norms in Nigeria, will engage 100 educators across their network in Lagos to undertake this project. The largest and liveliest city on the African continent, Lagos is a locale in which extreme wealth, extreme destitution, and hundreds of ethnic group communities coexist. 

Leaders in the Florida school districts of Citrus, Flagler, Miami-Dade, Pasco, Pinellas, and Putnam Counties also committed 100 educators for the proposed project. In these six districts, 50-75% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch (~62% on average), 17-35% are at or below the poverty level (~25% on average), 3-20% are Black, 5-70% identify as Hispanic/Latino (per National Center for Education Statistics 2018 data). We also note that only 45-60% of students in these districts achieved state math assessment proficiency in 2018/19. 

Addressing the need for inclusive STEM programming that not only includes but affirms and highlights the contributions, potential, and value of females and communities of color, approximately half the student participants in the proposed program will be female, as will most of the participating teachers; more than half of the student and teacher participants will be non-white, as well. This is important because as student participants explore Liberatory Design Thinking and how we can and must challenge marginalization, structural inequality, discrimination, and other norms of harm and inequity to ensure more just and sustainable futures, they will be guided to actively listen to and build on each others’ ideas. 

By encouraging cross-community collaboration with those norms of engagement, we aim to create space to elevate students’ agency, voice, and cultural assets. CASEL has suggested that such conditions support authentic relationships and co-learning and co-created solutions that deepen inclusion and lead to better outcomes for all, with important implications for students’ individual-level academic and career achievement. Contexts in which young people are positioned alongside adults “as experts in understanding and fashioning a world that is more just and equitable” also help students understand how they can individually and collectively impact community- and society-level dynamics and patterns (CASEL Equity Insights Report, 2020).

Homogeneous views and experiences often lead to uninspired outcomes, miscommunication, and misunderstanding. ALL learners - including future scientists, technology innovators, engineers, and mathematicians - should be nurtured as empathetic problem-solvers able to think critically and communicate effectively with people from a wide range of backgrounds and contexts. 

Leveraging the value of STEM disciplinary traditions as starting points for innovation and empathy, the proposed program increases Global North/Global South connection and collaboration opportunities for K-8 learners. Whether they’re convening in person or remotely, connecting synchronously or asynchronously, paired classrooms will collaborate around a design thinking challenge grounded in character-related competency development.

In 2019, 50+ STEM teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools used Empatico to support students’ SEL and collaboration. In January 2020, 83 educators in 8 U.S. districts and 3 schools in Mexico launched a second iteration of that program. Based on extremely positive feedback, we seek to fast-forward learnings regarding the considerations needed to provide STEM-empathy learning experiences that are equitable and mutually beneficial for learners in cultures as different as Nigeria and the U.S. 

Whereas previous programs relied heavily on synchronous exchanges and (primarily) domestic pairings targeting k-5 learners, here we’ll prepare for scale by adapting for low-connectivity realities and a k-8 age range, and establish mechanisms to equip educators to transcend cross-cultural biases and non-inclusive norms. World Learning and other partners/networks (including those associated with a coding project Empatico is launching with Code.org in Egypt in 2021/22) are interested in near-future replication opportunities.