Empathy is the ability to process someone else’s experience and feelings. Learning about empathy is important so that we can build safe communities and stronger friendships and one of the goals of an education system is to create responsible, caring and socially aware citizens who feel connected to their communities, societies and the wider world.
This is a goal that is sometimes lost sight of in the context of exam pressure and overloaded curricula and having realised this, a project called ‘Project Empathy’ was conceptualised in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic to bring ‘alive’ conversations around emotions, feelings, fears amongst schoolchildren and teachers.
This was a time when people were in the midst of traumatic events and this indeed was a much -needed initiative to help people understand and feel one another’s feelings and emotions. Kindness and compassion were what was needed the most.
Students doing graffiti with empathy messages.
Project Empathy is the brainchild of Vibha Lakhera. In the first phase, the project initiated a six-month long intervention in Boniyar, Kashmir, Kohima, Chieswema in Nagaland and New Delhi.
Workshops for teachers were conducted to orient the educators about the importance of addressing empathy in the schools and about the format of the intervention. The project was backed with the baseline research in collaboration with Sreepriya Menon who is a trained therapist.
The project has thrived on storytelling, journaling, artwork, discussions, nukkad nataks and many such creative ways of introducing empathy and compassion to the school ecosystem.
In a conversation with founder Vibha Lakhera during the Constellation’22 Inter-School Fest organised by Assam Rifles Public School and Project Empathy, Lakhera asserted that the project is designed in a manner so that nuances of empathy can be talked about with students and teachers.
“The idea was to bring these words like kindness, compassion, empathy more into a discourse of the students so that the orientation, the consciousness moves towards these words and the experience is that, these words remain in a day to day manner in the schools and of course, we also integrated other concepts like identity, imagination, perspective taking and reading emotions of one another. We included all of that and we created content so that children could be oriented and they could understand these complex topics well and start practicing,” Lakhera stated.
Project Empathy Founder, ARPS Principal and teachers with the students of ARPS during the 1st day of Constellation’22 Inter-School fest.
Lakhera said the project was initiated during the pandemic when she along with her colleague felt the need and importance that it was time to talk about empathy to the students because there was so much trauma and pain taking place.
Lakhera recalled: “There were maids kids who were struggling to learn through the online methodology that was being implemented at that time so I use to make them sit with me, teach them English, Hindi and math. After these lessons, we use to discuss other things as well like climate change, discrimination and I introduced them to the idea of empathy and to my surprise they really grasp it well despite being the kind of backgrounds that they were coming from and I felt that I was being quite assumptious that they won’t understand and that is where me and one of my colleague, co-founder of Project Empathy Sudha, principal of Alok Bharti public school, we decided that we must talk about empathy to the students and teachers in the school.”
The idea was to bring these words like kindness, compassion, empathy more into a discourse of the students so that the orientation, the consciousness moves towards these words – Vibha Lakhera.
Earlier, Lakhera was working on a project that addressed discrimination in schools in the form of favouritism and bullying. However, the project had to be halted due to the pandemic.
Notably, the bigger picture for the project as such is to be able to create a curriculum around empathy and roll it out in schools and the whole journey of the project will become the basis for painting that curriculum in the future, she said.
Furthermore, she believes that such project should be carried out for at least three years for the seeds that have been sowed in the first year to take root and it becomes a part of the psyche of children and the teachers in the schools.
The Kindness Tree – messages of kindness from the students.
She is also hopeful that Project Empathy can be rolled out in other parts of the country in the near future and for a start, Project Empathy will be initiated in Assam Rifles Public School, Jorhat.
Meanwhile, Kushagra Bhardwaj studying in class-8 ARPS shares that the project has helped him improve in his behaviour and studies, adding that “we all have been very kind after this project has started.”
Atiksh, a class-5 student, says: “In this Project Empathy, we have done various activities like closeness circle, question and answers so they have helped me know my friends better and also help me know what is empathy and sympathy.”
