Design Project: Empathy

For my design project, I am collaborating with two other Elementary Spanish teachers to create a project-based learning experience for our 4th grade students on water issues in our community compared to the water issues in a specific Spanish speaking country. In order to tie their country research into something important in their own life, I am going to have the essential question for this project be about water issues in those countries and how it relates to their own water use. Students will learn various new Spanish vocabulary by learning the water cycle and learning the different verbs used with water (to wash, to clean, to bathe, to drink, etc.). This knowledge of water will be important when students start to research a Spanish speaking country and the issues of water in that country. Ultimately, students will create a presentation for another classroom in our building where they explain why clean and safe water is a necessity, and what it looks like in their community and their Spanish speaking country.

Some of the empathy research methods that I, and my team, have started to use include the individual interviews, a survey, an interactive water game to collect observations, and working as a design team. First, I gave each of my 4th grade students a survey with five questions that would emit an emotional response about water issues, like “What do you think happens when people don’t have clean water?” and “How many gallons of water do you think you use a day?” With the survey questions I wanted students to be able to reflect on how they use water in their everyday life, if it is clean water, how they get the water, and the importance of having water. Next, I interviewed a few random 4th grade individuals about their daily use of water meaning what they use it for, how much they think the use, where it comes from, and what would happen if it were dirty. My colleagues also performed a survey and performed individual interviews on their own students, which is where the “empathy design team” comes into practice. Lastly, I am in the process of performing a hands-on water experiment where students are given a limited amount of clean water and have to decide how to use this water. While students are performing this experiment I am participating in it as well and collecting observations on students reactions, their choices, and how it makes them feel using dirty water.

By using these research methods I was able to gain considerable insight about my students reactions and emotions towards water issues in their own home and in our community. As stated in the article Storytelling and Repetitive Narratives for Design Empathy: Case Suomenlinna, empathy is “an imaginative projection into another person’s situation.” To put this in a design perspective, empathy is the ability to imagine yourself as the user of the design and create something that empathizes with the feelings of the user. The survey was a great tool to perform research because I was able to understand my student’s previous knowledge on this topic. For example, when I asked students the type of solutions we could create to help prevent dirty water I was surprised by the deepness of some of their answers. Students wrote about drilling more wells to access clean water, using filters (like they do in their own home), stop polluting peoples water supply, route more rivers towards civilization, and to stop using and putting chemicals on food/plants that go into the ground into drinking water. Further, when performing the “water game” I gave students a limited amount of “clean water” tokens, and then they had to use their “dirty water” tokens once they ran out of clean water to still perform their daily duties with water. During this activity my students started bargaining with each other for clean water tokens and they started sharing them among the class to avoid anyone using the dirty water tokens. With this game my students were already showing empathy towards one another, which I did not expect. Overall, it was compelling to learn that my students are motivated to learn more about this topic and already have some background on the content to help steer their way.