Cultivating Children’s Social Awareness in The Multicultural and Diverse Community : A Perspective From Empathetic Teaching

Abstract

The multicultural and social diversity urge children to build social awareness skill which drives them to consciously aware of specific range of social experience from a specific point of view. In educational setting, this becomes a concern because children spur into cultural diversity in their daily life so that teachers take a role to facilitate them with the ability to adapt with the situation. One of the ways in meeting the issue is through implementing empathetic teaching which is a concept of teachers showing their compassion to students. Therefore, the main framework of this study is to elaborate the concept and investigate further how empathetic teaching can allow teachers to cultivate social awareness to their students in the perception year. The originality of the paper lies in offering a conceptual framework of empathetic teaching through mapping the main relevant literatures and identifying and engaging with the central theoretical issues while suggesting a perceptual framing of classroom setting in childhood education. By analyzing the data using content analysis, the findings reveal that empathetic teaching practiced by teachers can be beneficial to build children’s social awareness through having good perception on their exposure to the surrounding. This also allows them to have an ability to adapt in the diverse community by appreciating differences to promote a social peaceful life in this contemporary world.