Talk description:

Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to experience another’s emotions and perceptions, is one of the major attitudes and actions underpinning an individual’s participation in dialogue across diversity. The goal of this presentation is to operationalize empathy as a discursive construct, manifested in children’s and adolescent’s dialogic interactions. A coding scheme is developed based on three distinct steps. First, a review of the operational definitions of empathy is conducted, to capture how its related values, skills, and dispositions have been detected thus far. Second, the definitory elements resulting from this review are captured in the dialogical construct of transactivity, as manifested through two main discursive operations namely other-orientedness and relevance. Finally, a coding scheme capturing both first- and second-order constructs is proposed, developing the insights from the previous steps. This coding scheme is intended to detect and measure how students of different educational levels mirror the abilities that characterize empathy in their dialogues. The coding scheme has been recently applied to an extensive corpus of teacher-led and small group discussions among pre-schoolers, primary and secondary school students from five different countries (England, Germany, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain), engaging in the same dialogical activities as part of a European project. The potentiality of the dialogic empathy coding scheme for other contexts is also discussed.

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