Encouraging Awareness and Empathy for Diversity Through Experiential Practiced Simulations

This paper describes an experiential, simulation-based learning activity designed to encourage graduate education students’ development of empathy for and awareness of diverse student populations. In order to allow students to take the “role of the other,” they were placed into different situations where they had to complete a simple activity with some simulated element experienced by a different audience. Those differences included visual impairments, auditory impairments, dyslexia, and serving as English learners. The empathy activity was situated in a course that centered around designing multimedia for learning and included the instruction of the design thinking process and designing for universal audiences as well. Upon completion of the simulated experience, students reflected with the group about their thoughts, feelings, struggles, and the implications of their experience on the future of their designs in instructional technology and teacher education. Throughout this design case, we discovered that taking thoughtful design measures into consideration can help instruct challenging and difficult abstract concepts such as empathy.