Empathy is a key concept within different curriculum areas, often considered a skill either supported by or contributing to disciplinary engagement. The concept of empathy however, is often undefined in policy and curriculum documents, though variously problematised in scholarship. Within History and History Education, for example, empathy is one of a number of central concepts that students and historians draw on to interpret the past. Empathy is considered a key skill in Citizenship and related adjectival educations such as Education for Sustainable Development. In Literacy contexts, stories and poems are celebrated for their capacity to support children in empathising with others, including distant and diverse others. This emotional engagement is in turn understood to enrich learners' ethical learning. 

The scholarship on empathy variously problematizes and extends how empathy is understood.  Drawing on existing literature, Endacott and Brooks (2013) frame historical empathy as a dual-dimensional, cognitive-affective construct. Furthermore, they argue that such conceptual understanding requires three key undertakings - historical contextualisation, perspective taking and  affective connection. Albeit a “problematic and contested term” (Foster, 2001, p. 167), it is argued that historical empathy can contribute to a deeper and more holistic understanding of the actions, motivations and contexts of people in past societies. In the classroom, historical empathy can support children to consider the premise that others may think and have thought differently to them over time and space and that their own personal views are likewise founded on particular experiences and worldviews (Waldron et al., 2021).  

In Citizenship Education, empathy is often presented as a key skill supporting universal values and humanitarian solidarity (see for example Oxfam, 2015). UNESCO’s (2015) Global citizenship education: topics and learning objectives, for example, suggests GCE contributes to socio-emotional learning outcomes that enable learners to respect diversity and care for others and the environment. Zembylas (2018) however, argues that Citizenship Education can maintain traditional hierarchies by encouraging the privileged to empathise with the disadvantaged. Instead he recommends critique of the social forces stoking emotions raised. Rather than learners being encouraged to imaginatively feel the emotions of another, he suggests attention be paid to power structures to enable different ways of affecting and being affected to emerge, generating solidarity and supporting action. Boler (1997) also critiques the virtue of traditional promotion of “empathy” (p.256), arguing that the celebration of empathising with another belies the fundamental distinctions and differences between the empathiser and that ‘other’. Boler, suggests that in fact empathy is a self-centred concern, premised on fear of experiencing what has befallen the other. According to Boler, empathy promoted in education tends to pacify rather than support social change.

In literary scholarship, Nanay (2018) distinguishes between feeling the emotions of a character, quasi emotion and feeling emotions for a character, vicarious emotion. Nussbaum also highlights the complex ways in which readers’ engage emotionally with fiction, highlighting the ethical stance of a novel as distinct from identification with character. Reader response scholarship explores the ways in which different aspects of books draw on readers’ imaginations to generate emotion (Arizpe et al., 2014). This paper uses critical discourse analysis to respond to the question: how is empathy conceptualised in formal school curricular?

This paper provides a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013; Van Dijk, 2015) of the concept of empathy in formal curricular. Focussed on Ireland, it critiques the conceptualisation presented in curricular and policy documents at early childhood, primary and post-primary level. The research first charts references to empathy across these documents and goes on to compare and contrast the conceptualisation of empathy across different levels and disciplinary areas. Through this analysis it offers a framework for understanding different disciplinary conceptions of empathy and proposes how education can promote empathy to challenge injustices. All primary and post primary curricular and key policy documents for Ireland were included in the study. All references to empathy across subject areas and class levels were identified and recorded. Key documents and curricular areas were then identified for further analysis; these included broad curriculum frameworks, and subject specifications in the areas of history and literacy and those related to citizenship (including: Wellbeing, Politics and Society and Climate Action and Sustainable Development). These documents were reviewed using critical discourse analysis to consider how empathy is conceptualised across education levels and disciplines. Policy texts were examined to establish how empathy was included or absent, the extent of presence or absence and to identify which ideas are emphasised, de-emphasied or implied (Fairclough, 2013).

There is increasing consideration of the role that formal education might play in contributing to addressing historic, longstanding, and emergent national and global challenges (e.g. Davies, 2004; Monroe et al., 2019; Barton, 2004), including relevant literature within the Irish context (e.g. McCully et al., 2022; Waldron et al., 2019; Barry et al., 2024; Oberman, 2024). Considering the proposed role of empathy in the process of tackling social problems and political issues, there is a need to consider how empathy is conceptualised across education curricula. This paper has undertaken a critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 2015) of ‘empathy’ as a concept across Irish educational curricular. Drawing on a critical multidisciplinary framework, the paper has utilised Critical Discourse Analysis to interrogate how empathy is conceptualised within curricular, before considering the modes of local and global social interaction which are affirmed by this framing. The paper considers the broader social structures within which these understandings are positioned, and explores how alternate ideas of empathy may legitimate, reproduce or indeed challenge inequalities or injustices within and interconnected to the Irish context.

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