EMPATHY IN PRIMARY SCHOOL LIFE SCIENCES COURSE: THE ROLES ASSUMED BY PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

Abstract

It is known that students face daily life problems in the life sciences course in primary school; therefore, it is particularly important to use empathic skills in resolving these problems. However, research has determined that the teachers allocate only limited time to empathic activities, and there also very few such activities in textbooks. Therefore, this study aimed to provide pre-service classroom teachers with empathy-based training that they could use in their future life sciences classes. This research was planned as a case study among qualitative research designs. The participants were 52 third-year pre-service teachers attending the Department of Classroom Teaching at a state university. The preservice teachers received empathy-based training consisting of the use of empathy, what empathic roles are, and how to use them in the life sciences course. The data collection tool was document analysis, and the quality of the empathetic texts created by pre-service teachers was examined after the training. Fifty-two empathic texts created by the pre-service teachers were examined. Most of the texts referred to a fire-damaged tree and a bird affected by environmental pollution with the least number of texts referring to grass affected by environmental pollution and a bird affected by the hunting season. In the activities created by the pre-service teachers, the basic criteria in the written empathic activities were found to be more appropriate than the quality-improving criteria. Of the 52 activities, only two activities did not comply with the empathic process and two did not comply with the given subject. Consequently, it can be argued that the training the preservice teachers received in this study was successful.