View - ResearchGate

Designing for Interaction 191force the positive environment created by the teacher. A positive, nurturing,and enabling atmosphere, which supports all children, provides the model fortheir own personal development and supports their relationships and empathywith others. We believe that flexible classrooms designed to meet children’sneeds, to encourage a wide range of interaction and collaboration, to enablethe co-construction of ideas, presentation of ideas and subsequent reflection,can help to support and nurture both the emotional, social and intellectual developmentof children. The NIMIS classroom aimed to provide a variety ofopportunities for presentation, interaction and reflection through the provisionof a number of different shared workspaces, co-operative layout and also electronicinteraction as well as affective support through the development of anempathic agent who would combine the affective and the cognitive supportat the computer to supplement the human support available from teacher andpeers, thus maximising the interaction.3. The Significance of EmpathyDeveloping a rich and sensitive understanding of every child requires considerableempathy on the part of the teacher. Research into empathy and intoteaching and learning in the ’60s and ’70s explored the concept in considerabledepth and linked empathy with effective teaching. Aspy (1972) and Rogers(1975), amongst others, highlighted the central nature of this quality not onlyin teaching but in all caring relationships. Empathy is widely associated withdevelopment and learning from intensely personal development during therapyto intellectual, spiritual, creative and also moral development [12]. Teachersare obliged both to discover a pupil’s existing skills or understanding in a particularsubject area and extend them but in order to do this most effectivelythey have to know the child as a person, know their confidence levels as wellas be aware of their academic understanding. They have to nurture their senseof self and support their academic success, which can also further develop theirsense of self. They may also develop their students awareness of other people,through simultaneously valuing them and opening their eyes to other attitudesand understandings very different from their own. Empathy and the interactionit involves therefore are central to developing understanding of subjects, skillsand of other human beings. The study on empathy in teacher/pupil relationshipsis UK based and involved recorded interviews with pupils and teachersand observations of them at work in the classroom using tape-recorders andfield notes [5]. Later, it involved secondary and primary schoolteachers of differentgenders and subject specialisms and degrees of responsibility who wereespecially selected for their empathic approach to teaching and learning. Analysisfollowed grounded theory methodology [19]. These teachers understood