The inclusive approach is increasingly present in normative frameworks, some as relevant as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015. In the field of higher education, the Communiqué of the World Conference on Higher Education 2009 urged to pursue the goal of equity, in which access, participation, progress and welfare of all students are involved. For their part, in Europe, the ministers responsible for the European Higher Education Area have expressed in the EHEA Ministerial Communiqués of Bucharest (2012), Yerevan (2015), Paris (2018) and Rome (2020) their aspiration to strengthen the social dimension of higher education, and to improve access and progress for underrepresented and vulnerable minorities, establishing adequate support and guidance services, as well as more flexible itineraries.

That being said, the good practices associated to these sociopolitical longings of inclusion have begun to spread in Europe’s higher education, although the presence of institutional indicators associated with these practices is still limited (Buenestado-Fernandez et al., 2019). Together with the identification of some advances in policies and practices, differences between institutions in terms of commitment to diversity are notable (LePeau et al. 2018), which may be indicative of very heterogeneous visions, missions and organizational cultures.

When higher education institutions educate future teachers of non-university educational levels, the challenge is twofold because, on the one hand, they must answer to the demand of transforming institutional culture from an inclusive approach and, secondly, they are contributing to the future advancement of inclusion in non-university stages (early childhood, primary, and secondary education). Teacher education, with its consequent achievements in attitudes and teaching strategies (Paz-Maldonado, 2018), as well as in the avoidance of learning and participation barriers (Sandoval-Mena et al., 2019), represents a fundamental pillar for inclusion to be instilled into the curriculum and, ultimately, into the climate and institutional culture. For this reason, validation of teaching methodologies is necessary with the consequent transfer to the training of university teachers, and not only in teacher education degrees, but in any type of study (Paz-Maldonado, 2020).

An inclusive university curriculum could consider, as valuable actions, to help students favor self-transcendence, promote adherence to universal moral principles and facilitate the development of empathic dispositions. All this can be achieved through the framework of a cosmopolitan curriculum by which we can provide education to world citizens and a sense of belonging to a common humanity. In relation to this possibility, UNESCO (2015) proposed as a learning outcome the assumption of values ​​and responsibilities on the basis of human rights, as well as the development of empathic attitudes. In the European context, the Council of the European Union Recommendation of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning included both types of skills (empathy and morality/ethics) in the definition of several key competences for lifelong learning.

In a wider project of investigation (Ref. EDU2017-82862-R) and in response to this demand for training future teachers to become global citizens, we have tried to verify whether a teaching methodology, based on narrative persuasion (Hoeken et al., 2016) and on the Konstanz Method of Dilemma Discussion (Lind, 2019), is in fact effective when designed to teach empathetic and moral competences in the context of the curriculum of teacher training for Primary Education and Early Childhood Education. The intention of this approach is to take steps in the consolidation of teaching strategies in higher education that have theoretical support and solid evidence in the construction of an inclusive curriculum in teacher training.

DESIGN. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of an active methodology to help students develop moral end empathic competences, a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design was adopted. PARTICIPANTS. The sample consisted of 4 groups with a final sample of 216 students of teacher education degrees who were in their first semester (81.9% women; age: M = 19.25, SD = 2.83). 3 groups were experimental (Empathy, Moral Competence, Combined [Empathy & Moral Judgment]), whereas 1 group was control. INTERVENTION. The intervention in each of the three experimental groups, as well as the methodology implemented in the control group—active, but excluding the teaching of inclusive competences—was implemented during 10 sessions (one per week) with an effective duration per session of approximately 50 minutes. The 10 sessions of the Empathy group, as well as five of the sessions of the Combined group, followed an active methodology based on narrative persuasion in order to achieve the transportation and emotional identification of students with the protagonists of the story (Hoeken et al., 2016). For its part, the methodological intervention in the Moral Competence group, as well as five of the sessions of the Combined group, was aimed at helping participants develop moral competence through an adaptation of the Constance Method of Moral Dilemmas (Lind, 2019), consisting of the persuasive, dialogical debate by which participants try to convince their opponents about their position around a dilemma with ethical components. INSTRUMENTS. Two techniques were used: 1) The Moral Competence Test by Lind (2013), that measures the capacity of a person to judge arguments according to their moral quality instead of to their opinion; and 2) the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test (López-Pérez et al., 2019), that includes 4 scales: two of them are cognitive (Perspective-taking and Emotional Understanding), and two are affective (Empathic Distress, and Empathic Joy). PROCEDURE. The teaching of empathy and moral competence was inserted as a focus on the usual teaching and learning activities of an introductory subject to the Theory and History of Education, corresponding to the first year of the Early childhood and Primary Education degrees. The research was carried out over 2.5 months: 1 pretest; 10 sessions for the intervention; and 1 posttest. A follow-up measure was planned, but was finally cancelled because of confinement measures to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Repeated measures analysis did not show a significant effect due to the interaction between measurement (within-subject factor) and group (between-subject factor) in the case of empathy. In other words, the methodology used in the Empathy and Combined group was not able to change the learning curve between the pretest and the posttest with respect to the control group. The results were different in the case of the Moral Competence group, in which the intervention aimed at the development of moral competence helped students make some progress in this type of learning in relation to the control group, as it was shown in a significant effect due to the interaction of factors (within and between-subject). Although moral judgement is influenced by a myriad of variables (including empathy), this is in itself a cognitive and complex reasoning process which can be facilitated experientially in social and cooperative contexts using cognitive tasks, while empathy could belong to a more dispositional sphere, being a multidimensional attribute that would be more difficult to change in ecological contexts and in a relatively short period of time, particularly when initial empathetic levels are high. The intervention might have been longer to achieve effective empathic learning, although there are also doubts about this possibility, since meta-analyses by Teding van Berkhout and Malouff (2016) and Fragkos and Crampton (2020) have not identified the duration as a significant moderator of the effect size in experimental treatments to enhance empathy. In any case, the use of different instruments in future studies could also yield results more confirmatory than those obtained in our research with the Cognitive and Affective Empathy Test, and this is so because of the shortages that have been noticed in the adjustment between definitions of empathy and measures (Hall and Schwartz, 2019).

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