Teaching Empathy Through Art

​Throughout my many years of creating art and as a teaching artist, I have always felt my art should support the communities where I have lived and the causes I hold dear. One of the ways I have done this in the past and I am excited about doing in the future is through workshops and hands-on public art events for children and adults that teaches community and personal/cultural empathy.

​The term “empathy” is used to describe a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.*
*https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy/definition

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​The word “empathy” means a sharing of feelings. Cultural empathy means that a person has an awareness and understanding of the cultural attributes of a given society and how they differ from his or her own culture. One who is empathetic will tend to be more accepting of differences rather than seeing them as good or bad, right, or wrong.**
**cultural empathy: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management  www.blackwellreference.com.