Looking back over 15 years of teaching mainly adult learners, the terms ‘tailoring’, ‘customizing’, ‘adapting’, or ‘individualizing’ the content and our methods of teaching English could lead us to question what we, as teachers, can learn from our learners and how this knowledge impacts our teaching. Using the learner not only as a content resource but also as a source of inspiration necessarily evokes empathy from the teacher and sheds new light on teaching models and on the role as a teacher, with a shift from the model of teaching a foreign language (or the learner) to the model of helping learners learn a foreign language. Empathy has been identified as the main source of an emerging society by Jeremy Rifkin, economist, sociologist and political advisor, who says: “The age of Reason is being eclipsed by the age of empathy”. Concrete examples and tips will help you adopt an empathic teaching model to prepare for an “empathic society” in the future.
- Csilla Járay-Benn
- Csilla Járay-Benn