Pupils who are best prepared for the future are change agents. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of national, regional and local measures and actions to promote empathy skills development in Europe is hindered by the lack of entrepreneurship education strategies and guidelines. They can have a positive impact on their surroundings, influence the future, understand others' intentions, actions and feelings, and anticipate the short and long-term consequences of what they do. The concept of competency implies more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills; it involves the mobilisation of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to meet complex demands. Future-ready students will need both broad and specialised knowledge. Pupils will need to apply their knowledge in unknown and evolving circumstances. For this, they will need a broad range of skills, including social and emotional skills (e.g. empathy, self-efficacy and collaboration). E4CM’s methodology is an evolution of the Danish BA Teacher Education program, from which it evolved incorporating different methods, including group work, discussions and lectures, and will be conducted in a spirit of intellectual freedom, equality and democracy with the skills to plan both the academic as well as the educational (learning environment) aspects of the teaching. E4C aims at giving all pupils the best possibilities for an all-round development and learning, her methods builds on the principle of differentiated teaching. The teaching is organized in such a way that it both strengthens and develops the individual pupil's interests, qualifications and needs and so that it contains common experiences and situations providing them with experience which prepare them for cooperation in the performance of tasks. All this will develop the pupil's awareness and imagination and a confidence in their own possibilities and backgrounds such that they are able to commit themselves and are willing to take action. All this lays the foundation for developing empathy skills and understanding of others. The evaluation phase will be a combination of the pilot schools' experiences, including the experiences of pupils, teachers and parents. Project’s structure foresees a 5 days transnational training, a national training to disseminate the acquired skills and a 19 months piloting in primary schools. The intellectual outputs of the project will be a multilingual Empathy toolkit and guidelines for teachers and stakeholders (incl. Policy makers) in order to include Empathy in the european education curriculum. The main target groups are the teachers/parents and pupils. The goal is to involve in the project, 10 schools in each country in order to build a research community. Each school will involve 4 school classes with an average of 25 pupils (= 40x4x25 = 4000). This means that at national level the national trainings will train at least 40 teachers will be supported to build a research community in the classroom. Considering that also parents will be involved (4000x2), the participants will be more than 12.000 individuals E4C will have a direct impact on the evolution of european education curriculum including Empathy in the primary school curricula.
Specific objectives can be defined as follows: - improve the level of key competences and skills of pupils, - foster the adoption of new innovative methodology with a quality improvement of education institutions, in particular schools and public stakeholders. - enhance policy reforms at national level and to support the modernisation of education, in particular through the dissemination of innovative approaches; - foster the use of the E4C methodology to include empathy in the current school curriculum, also using a cross curricular approach. Empathy is the ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own. Kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago. The project aimed at improving a new educational methodology to increase emotional awareness and empathy in pupils, focusing on how to articulate experiences, thoughts, feelings, and senses through an empathy training. The project encouraged pupils, teachers and parents to talk about feelings and learn to become more caring toward each other. The project mixed together pupils of different strengths and weaknesses, shier kids with more gregarious ones, supporting them in the difficult Covid 19 times.
Young people can have a positive impact on their surroundings, influence the future if and when they have a deeper understanding of others' intentions, actions and feelings, and anticipate the short and long-term consequences of what they do. The concept of competency implies more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills; it involves the application of such knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to meet complex demands in an ever-changing world. Future generations will need both broad and specialised knowledge. Pupils will need to apply their knowledge in unknown and evolving circumstances. For this, they will need a wide range of skills, including those of a social and emotional nature and specifically Empathy. The Empathy for Children (E4C) project adapted the methodology developed from the Danish BA Teacher Education programme incorporating different approaches, including group work, discussions and instruction all of which are conducted in a spirit of intellectual freedom, equality and democracy to best enhance the academic, emotional and social skills required for young people to make a positive contribution in order to include Empathy in the current school curriculum in all project countries.