Where We Are: Understanding Instructor Perceptions of Empathy in Engineering Education

Abstract

Empathy is a necessary soft skill for 21st century engineers that can support engineering design, creativity, ethical skills, and collaboration. Empathy-based pedagogical research has predominantly focused on course or project-specific approaches. This paper presents instructor (n = 40) perceptions on empathy as a professional skill and as a pedagogical area captured in a survey distributed to the Faculty of Engineering, University of Waterloo. Instructors identified empathy as a moderately to extremely important professional skill but expressed a wider range of opinions on the importance of empathy-based pedagogy ranging from not at all important to extremely important. This difference in perceptions may be connected to self-identified gender, professional engineering status, and perceived connections between empathy and a wider range of graduate attributes. Future work will focus on a qualitative analysis of survey statements to better understand the broader context of instructor perceptions and developing a larger multi-institution study.