My UWCSEA Learning Journey

How does my idea of empathy changed after this service?

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another – it is how we care and communicate with others. It is a human tendency and we all possess empathy at different levels. This service has helped my reflect more on what empathy means and where it is misconstrued. In our service, we interact with students with cerebral palsy – a cognitive disability that usually occurs during childbirth that leads to a lack of the ability to muscle control. In our sessions, we assist teacher with their lessons like art and craft or food exploration.

I’ve always been quite an empathetic person but service has helped me be more true with my empathy. Oftentimes, the world views people who are differently abled with pity, not empathy. We always think that we should be extra-kind or extra-sensitive towards people who aren’t the same as this and this is the basis of being unauthentic with how we care. When I first joined the service, I did not understand this difference. But I learnt that it is treating the students we work with just as anyone else and not like they need our pity in it’s own way to show our true empathy. Empathy is sharing the feelings of another – equal to another, it isn’t being overly polite to people.

 

Over the last season, I signed up for a local service in which we work with children in the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Center. The experience taught all the students in the service a lot. Firstly, it made us aware of the condition of Cerebral Palsy in general. We learnt the causes of CP which is due to lack of oxygen in birth, methods of treatments and different types of therapy, types of CP (paraplegic, diaplegic), special ways of calming the children, example, multi-sensory rooms and developed methods of teaching using adapted resources like visual simulations and ‘yes’ or ‘no’ buttons. Mainly, it helped us be better informed and be less prejudiced about the issue. We learnt how to interact appropriately with the students, while also encountering and getting over the difficulties of creating an impactful and simulating lesson when we have limited time to work. Initially, it was hard to connect with the children and personalise lesson plans based upon the group of students. However, we learnt to strategise new ways of creating activities (eg. musical chairs with hoola-hoops) and learnt to be more resourceful and thoughtful while planning as well. Personally, I wasn’t quite aware of what CP was before joining this service or never worked with differently abled children before and it was quite hard to break out of a shell and try to finds methods and ways to connect with them even if it seems hard or non-beneficial. Through the process, I learnt a lot about conduct and challenges that come with trying to teach differently abled children. I learnt how to be patient or understanding of a variety of situations.