Empathetic Timing and Existential Landscapes—An Investigation of the Significance of Empathy in Educational Practices Open Access

Abstract

Empathy is said to be central to the lifeworld of professional practices, especially to educational-didactical practice. Most standard accounts of empathy are based on face-to-face encounters between two people: one in need of help and one providing help. In those descriptions, the emphasis is often on the helper's capacity to understand the verbal or bodily expressions of the other person rather than on the more tacit dimensions such as the co-embodied situation as a whole, including its spatial and habitualized embeddedness. This article develops a different account of empathy. Instead of proceeding from the dual model of the helper–helped, we view empathy as emerging in aesthetically and existentially significant situations that are shaped by limited time and space, where what we call “empathetic timing” is needed. Empathetic timing describes a practice of musical interplay in relation to the specific existential landscape of an ongoing event. Starting from a concrete example from early childhood education in which a group of children and teachers are gathering in a hallway to get ready for an outdoor visit, the notion of empathetic timing is developed in dialogue with concepts based on analogies to dance, Edith Stein's phenomenological-existential theory on empathy, and Tim Ingold's concept of landscapes. The sensuous, moving everyday life at the preschool is understood as a challenge where ethical and aesthetical dimensions are intertwined.

In the Hallway

I am standing pressed against a countertop in the hallway of the Nyckelpigan section [department of the preschool], and I am filming. The children are getting ready to go to Gethagen, a grove of pine trees at the back of the preschool. The hallway, approximately twelve square meters in my estimation, is crowded with children getting dressed. It's late winter, the season of padded overalls and snow pants. In the midst of this chaos, Malena sits on a stool on wheels, taking the children's baskets down from the shelves. Near the door, Erika assists the children, one by one, climbing onto a bench where she skillfully ensures that the rubber bands of the snow pants are in place over their boots.

There are many children in the hallway. As an outsider, I can barely comprehend how the children can find their own clothes, let alone put them on. However, the atmosphere is generally cheerful, and I understand that this is how things usually go at Nyckelpigan. Two older children are already dressed up, waiting in front of the exit door. “Is this a routine?” I think to myself. After a short while, they start joking with each other in loud voices. Erika quickly assigns them the task of distributing reflective vests to the other children who are ready. The younger children continue struggling with their clothes. Someone becomes upset because they can't find their mittens, and Malena magically conjures a pair of warm, fuzzy ones from the lost-and-found box. The upset child doesn't immediately calm down but continues crying a bit more. At this point, the hallway fills with some of the youngest children who have had their diapers changed before joining the group. They are guided by Malena's voice as they make their way toward her. Erika, who is standing up, notices that Irma is missing. In an instant, Erika takes Irma's snowsuit, with boots already in place inside the suit's legs, and begins walking through the crowded hallway with the snowsuit as if it were a marionette. A child asks what she's doing. She replies that the snowsuit is looking for Irma. She pretends to be the snowsuit, calling out, “Irmaaa, Irmaaa!” With giggles, Irma crawls out from under the coat rack and hugs her snowsuit. When Irma starts getting dressed, Erika sneaks into the bathroom for a minute and changes into her outdoor gear before taking the children who are ready out to the preschool yard. The atmosphere becomes a bit airier and calmer as the dressed children troop out, and Malena can continue comforting and helping those who are still getting dressed.¹

We will not comment on this little scene here but will take it up later.

Introduction

In professions where the core activity consists of interactions with other people—often referred to as interpersonal professions—empathy is considered to be a crucial skill.² A teacher, a physician, or a flight attendant performs their job better if they relate to their pupils, patients, or customers in an empathetic way. In this context, empathy is often understood as the capacity to act based on an understanding of the other's situation or perspective. The ability to empathize is taken to be especially central for those working with young children in preschools.³ The significance of empathy for this professional field is rooted in, among other things, the explicit asymmetrical relationship between children and adults. If the adults working within early childhood education fail or—for some reason—stop trying to understand the children on their own terms and relate to their perspectives, they risk—according to the prevailing discourse—depriving children of opportunities for participation and, ultimately, hinder their development into independent, critically thinking citizens.⁴ Thus, the concept of empathy is frequently used and highlighted as significant and important for early childhood education in research, regulatory documents, and educational manuals.⁵ In Sweden, the national context in which this article is situated, the ability to empathize is even defined in the preschool curriculum and in the objectives of preschool teacher education as something to be conveyed to the children.⁶ Parallel to the vigorous discourse on empathy, there also exists a debate on possible negative consequences of promoting empathy. Terms like empathy fatigue (compassion fatigue) and ethical stress⁷ are used. Empathy fatigue is considered a result of resource shortages that lead people working in so-called care professions, such as preschool teachers, to constantly face moral dilemmas where they must choose whose perspective to consider.⁸ The debate suggests that too much empathy, excessive sensitivity to others’ perspectives and suffering, can make preschool staff sick and exhausted.

However, given this interest in the concept of empathy, there is surprisingly little agreement on how to define and understand empathy within educational theory and practice. Rather, perspectives and models are borrowed from other contexts, such as caring professions, social work,⁹ or cognitive developmental psychology and therapy.¹⁰ What is missing is a broader debate about which or what different phenomena the concept refers to and what specific challenges one can find inherent in the everyday life of educational practices that make empathy both essential and challenging. This is a debate we aim to initiate in this article. As a prerequisite for that, we take it that it is necessary to go back to the way the “problem” is formulated to which empathy is an answer. Most standard accounts to empathy are based on descriptions of face-to-face encounters between two people where one is a helper and the other is in need of help.¹¹ In those descriptions, the emphasis is often on the helper's or empathizer's capacity to understand the verbal or bodily expressions of the other. If we look at the situation in the hallway described earlier, it would be the two preschool teachers, Erika and Malena, who are the ones who should base their practice of helping the children putting on their clothes on the capacity to relate to and understand the children's perspectives on the situation.

In this article, we will develop a different account on empathy. Instead of proceeding from a dual model of the helper–helped, we view empathy as emerging in aesthetically and existentially significant situations that are shaped by limited time and space and an interplay of multiple subjects. ¹² A specific situation that calls for empathy within professional practices, such as in this case of the situation in a hallway of a preschool, is constituted by norms and routines, preestablished relations between the subjects involved, and their individual daily condition. The complexity of a situation entails more and other possible positions than the dual model suggests; it is not always clear who helps whom, and roles can change quickly. Rather, empathy occurs as a part of a joint activity that can be performed more or less successfully and that can change its meaning and direction under the very process.¹³

It is this dynamic dimension of empathy that we will develop in this article as “empathetic timing.”¹⁴ Empathetic timing is central to the professional role of preschool teachers and to many other professional practices, but it is also something young children can perform. It differs, in our view, from the idea of empathy as a one-way activity between two subjects, where one provides empathy (the educator) and the other receives it (the child). Empathic timing has a spatial-situational embodied structure more akin to the mutual listening and adapting of actions that occurs, for example, among musicians in a band or orchestra where improvisation takes place. The analogy to musical contexts also opens up other concepts, such as groove—a joyful sense of meaning that can arise in the wake of empathic timing. Before we dive deeper into this concept and take a closer look at the example described earlier, let us take a look at common understandings of empathy in the quite vast empathy literature.

Different Perspectives on Empathy

In empathy research, there are conflicting perceptions of what empathy entails and how the concept of empathy should be defined. One of the most popular approaches to the question of empathy can be called the “cognitive perspective.” Here, empathy is described as the ability to “take the other's perspective.”¹⁵ Empathy is understood as the ability to imagine what it would be like to be in the other person's shoes. This perspective is sometimes also called “simulation theory.”¹⁶ To understand a child's perspective would then mean imagining what it would feel like to have to put on a thick snowsuit in a cramped hallway or to wait for the others to finally go outside. The cognitive perspective has been criticized for different reasons, one of those being the failure to take into account the specific relationship between self and other. In preschool research, Dion Sommer, Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson, and their colleagues have argued against the cognitive perspective that empathy involves recognizing the other's experience as precisely another experience. Us imagining what it would be like to put on the snowsuit would still only lead us to our own experience of the situation—what it would feel like to us. Sommer and colleagues are careful to emphasize the difference between adopting a children's perspective, something they consider impossible, and adopting a “child perspective.” Being empathetic, they argue, means relating to the children's perspective while simultaneously understanding that it is a different perspective:

To adopt a child perspective, as described according to Sommer et al., is to interpret the child's own subjective relationship to their lifeworld.¹⁸ To do this, one must have a thorough view on the specific child's or group of children's surroundings and interests. Another prominent understanding of the concept of empathy, which we will hereafter call “shared emotion perspective,” starts from the premise that empathy is fundamentally not about understanding the otherness of the other but is instead based on a certain sharing of emotions.¹⁹ Being able to understand a child's joy or unwillingness to put on a snowsuit means that, to some extent, we also share the joy or discomfort of the situation. Empathetically sharing the state of mind of the other from this perspective means that we are influenced by the other's experience based on our similar experiences and emotions at an earlier point in our life.²⁰

Both perspectives on empathy, the cognitive and the shared emotion approach, capture, as we take it, important aspects of the phenomenon of empathy that cannot be reduced to each other. On the contrary, we assume that empathy is a concept describing a very complex phenomenon that includes both cognitive and affective dimensions. The Danish phenomenologist Dan Zahavi suggests that instead of opposing the various representations of empathy, one can talk about different levels of complexity, where the idea of relating to others’ perspectives as precisely the perspective of others describes the most basic ontological starting point for empathy as an understanding of intersubjectivity as such, something he calls “basic empathy.”²¹ This way of approaching the question is important for an epistemological-ontological understanding of the phenomenon's different dimensions. However, it does not solve the problem of how to understand the relationship between cognitive and emotional perspectives as well as epistemological and more existential-ethical perspectives on empathy within concrete intersubjective professional practices, where the life, development, and well-being of young human beings is at stake.

The Complexity of the Situation and Empathy as an Inherent Value

In our view, the debate on empathy, although emphasizing complexity, is too focused on the face-to-face relationship between individual subjects. What we are missing for an investigation of educational contexts is a discussion of the specific complexity of the situation itself and the structures that characterize interactions within an institutional framework. Much like the members of an orchestra, the children and their teachers in a preschool share a common history, reacting spontaneously and bodily to each other based on the given situation and what has been and will happen. The everyday life of preschool is shaped by the involvement of several perspectives. In this environment, the relationships have been established over a longer period, unlike, for example, in the police or nursing professions, which often involve quick reactions in relation to a person who is a stranger. Yet, a situation can also change rapidly at preschool—a mood can shift from stressful to cheerful. The one who was supposed to be the “needy” one becomes the one who acts empathetically. This is seen, for example, when a child in need of support suddenly becomes someone who can provide support and help to others, such as in the situation described earlier where some children started distributing vests to others.

In current research on care, two different understandings of the nature of what is called “emotional work” are defined and used, similar to the previously described definitions of empathy. The difference appears, among other things, in the discussion of whether care is an inherent value of an activity or is an activity itself.^22,23 When care is described as an inherent value, normative ideas emerge. One of these ideas is that care is a female project, referring to the traditional (invisible and unpaid) women's work that has taken place and is taking place in the private sphere, including caring for children, elderly, and sick relatives, and is related to a concept of love. Another line of argumentation is that care is a practice. A practice that can be learned, critically examined, and developed. The question then is whether empathy can be understood in the same way. Is the general perception of empathy in interpersonal professions that it is an inherent value? And what would happen if we instead approached empathy as a practice? The debate revolves around whether empathy is either a cognitive practice, a theory of the other mind, or an immediate feeling that must be felt to be genuine and thus cannot easily be trained or explained or, for that matter, valued. In relation to this, we want to take a third path. This does not mean that one cannot have an instrumental relationship to empathy, that is, reflecting upon what it means to be another or truly feel with someone who is sad or happy. However, the form of empathy that we call “empathic timing” is something else. Empathic timing, when practiced in preschools, is neither purely cognitive-instrumental nor inherently emotional (something only I feel) but describes a knowledge field that arises between individuals in an ongoing situation (not first empathy and then action, see note).²⁴ Before we describe empathetic timing in more detail, let us turn to someone who laid the groundwork for our thinking about empathy, namely Edith Stein and her phenomenological perspective on what she called “Einfühlung.”

Edith Stein—A Phenomenological Perspective on Empathy

In Sweden, the concept of empathy was used for the first time in the 1950s, although the German-Jewish philosopher Edith Stein had already written her dissertation on the topic “Zum Problem der Einfühlung” (On the Problem of Empathy) in 1914.²⁵ Stein develops her theses as a critique of the idea of Einsfühlung (or word play; literal translation, “feeling as one”), which was formulated at that time by her fellow philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps. Lipps understood Einsfühlung as a form of mutual perception where one's own and the other's subjectivity are blurred in a common experience of togetherness, where it is no longer meaningful to speak of a distinction between one's own and the other's consciousness. According to Lipps, this can occur, for example, when one becomes infected with another's joy. It is no longer an experience of that person who is happy, but both people are happy together. A we arises. However, Stein argues that this does not describe what happens in a situation of empathy because the other's intentional object (i.e., the content of perception) of joy differs from one's own. Also, the temporal directions of the acts of joy differ from each other. While the other is happy about an event in the future, for example, finally coming outside to the playground to run around and feel free, the one who is infected by the feeling is directed towards the other's joy here and now; this is the empathizer's intentional object.²⁶

Against the background of this criticism, Stein develops the act of empathy as a three-step process: First, there is a discovery of another person's emotional expression, then an identification of what emotion it seems to be, and finally an insight that the emotion does not include oneself. Stein argues that the ability to empathize partly involves personal experiences—that we ourselves have experienced something similar allows us to understand what another person is experiencing without feeling the same thing ourselves. This last part is important for Stein because she argues that the three-step chain is often interrupted: instead of distinguishing our own feeling from the feeling of the person in front of us, we risk being drawn into the other person's emotional expression and taking it over.

In a complex everyday life where many things happen simultaneously and where much is based on habits and routines, it is easy to imagine that Stein's three-step process is interrupted. The person who empathizes with someone (a child, a client) may not reach the third stage, may not see the emotion expressed by the other as separate from themselves. The situation includes an understanding of the context. Meaning does not emerge in itself but always against the background of something, which we can call a “landscape.”

Landscapes and Traces

Our understanding of the contextual meaning of empathy, where people's actions gain significance, is inspired by Tim Ingold's concept of landscapes. The embodiment of space, time, and world is developed by Ingold in Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood Dwelling and Skill.²⁷ For Ingold, a landscape is not land, space, or nature; it is the world we inhabit and feel, the world we dwell in.²⁸ There is a reciprocity between humans and their environment, according to Ingold, and humans are both influenced by and leave traces in the landscape they inhabit, operate in, and dwell in. The landscape, if examined, can inform us about the lives people live and the work that takes place there and also about how previous generations have lived and worked. We become part of the landscape, and it becomes part of us. The embodiment of this reciprocity can be understood as a movement in which form and meaning emerge.

In a phenomenological reading of Ingold, one could say that we are connected to a landscape through our lived body. The tasks we perform and the care we feel for the landscape affect it, but the work also opens us up; a mutual exchange takes place between us and the landscape, leaving traces in us over time. We argue that empathic timing occurs within the framework of a landscape, and the landscape is what provides stability, making empathic timing “effective.”

A landscape, as we see it, can be a preschool with its children and educators. Children leave traces in the activities through the relationships they have with each other and with the teachers. They leave traces through the drawings and creations they make, through the voices that resonate, through the laughter and games that fill the premises.

When we open ourselves to another and through empathy understand another lived body, a type of trace is inscribed in us. Our own experiences are enriched over time, and some of them may be reinforced. The children who attend Nyckelpigan in our initial example will carry their years in preschool as a lived experience. The memories and images of Erika and Malena, of the other children, and of smells, tastes, the space, stories, and things, will influence them later in life. The experiences we have of the world and the experiences of other bodies leave traces in us and lead into the future. Leaving traces behind can thus be seen as a temporal extension from a now into a future, both as traces that we leave through the relationships we have with others and traces that others can follow as a way of orienting themselves.

Back to Nyckelpigan

The situation in the hallway described in the example encompasses thoughts, care, and expressions of empathy, but it takes its starting point in an everyday life in a landscape full of habits and pre-understanding. There is a spatial and historical dimension that interweaves what happens in the landscape now with all other days and with everything that will happen during this particular day. In the example, the teachers do many things the way they usually do. They have habits, and the children are familiar with these habits. One habit is that when the children at Nyckelpigan are about to go outside, all the children who don't wear diapers go out at the same time in the hallway, even if it gets a bit crowded. The teachers know that it usually works out; they know what the group of children can handle. The younger ones thus have a calm moment on the changing table, and the teacher taking care of them can put on their first layer of clothes.

At the same time, everyday life at a preschool is rarely the same from one day to another. Things are constantly happening in the children's group; it can be small incidents or larger existential crises. Someone may have slept poorly and has a minor breakdown when they can't find their mittens; another may have cut their finger, requiring both a plaster and comfort; a third may have just had a little brother or sister, which may have turned their whole existence upside down. All these events affect the children and therefore the group as a whole, so they need to be taken into account in some way; everyday life has its form, structure, and perhaps also dramaturgy. The structure and dramaturgy of the days create meaning and impressions for both children and adults.

In the scene in the hallway, there is a calm and relaxed atmosphere between the teachers, Erika and Malena. Essentially, there is not much talk between them. They move calmly and use calm voices. They are constantly busy, lifting down boxes, unhooking garments from hooks, placing boots on the correct side so the children can get the right boot on the right foot. They show in action what they expect from the children, which is the focus on getting dressed and going outside. While supervising the children getting dressed, Erika spots one of the children, Irma, hiding under the coat rack. We perceive this as a kind of “classic” game. Many of us, as children, have played hide-and-seek and perhaps longed for it. It feels wonderful to hear from the hiding place that someone notices that you are missing and calls you back. We don't know if this is a common game at Nyckelpigan, but the hiding spot Irma chooses indicates that she wants to be found. It could be that she wants it to be noticed that she is gone so that someone will fetch her back into the community, and this might result in a bit of care and attention.

We do not know if Irma's hide-and-seek game is an invitation to play that stems from a desire to make her attachment to the group visible and reinforced, but we think that the teacher Erika makes a similar assessment of the situation as we do. It seems as if Erika understands that Irma wants to be found and wants to be the one welcomed with extra care into the community. However, instead of entering the game as the teacher who is worried, searching, and offering help, Erika lets Irma's snowsuit be the one missing its person and needing to be taken care of. A possible interpretation of Erika's actions is that she understands Irma, but in the moment, she seems to be directed towards the whole group's goal—to go outside. She wants to meet Irma's need for a bit more confirmation but at the same time has the whole group's needs to bear in mind. The older children are already ready, and, although they have a task of distributing vests, they need to get outside soon. The little ones want to have a bit more space and calmness around them, now that they are also in the hallway. Furthermore, Erika might be thinking about Irma's educational development; Irma needs to practice putting on her own clothes herself. It is important for Erika to support her in this acquisition of skill and autonomy. Erika pretending that the snowsuit is seeking its person and wants to be worn shifts the focus from Irma needing to practice to Irma being the one who can help the snowsuit to be used. Instead of being needy, Irma becomes the one who is knowing and able and who can provide help.

While Erika gives Irma the special attention she seems to need, it has not much affected the focus on getting dressed for the other children. Someone has asked what Erika is doing, but otherwise everyone continues with their activities. According to our perspective, Erika has demonstrated empathic timing in relation to the entire situation.³⁰ But what do we mean by that?

Empathic Timing

Empathy evokes a sense of urgency in the empathizer. Being empathic is seen, as we have already mentioned, as a given in certain professional roles. However, empathy also risks draining those who constantly need to be emotionally engaged with others due to their profession. Between the two paths of understanding mentioned earlier, the cognitive approach and the shared emotion approach, there is, as we see it, a third way to approach how empathy can take place in interpersonal professions. By understanding empathy as a practice related to a situated web of meaning grounded in habits, experiences, and pre-understandings, a different space for action can emerge. Viewing empathy as a practice opens up the possibility that situations, temporal frames, and environment are also part of an interaction. It is about listening to others in their own right and being able to adapt one's actions to what is happening without losing track of what one is supposed to do in this particular situation. It involves listening to others and being responsive to what they express while also being active. As we wrote earlier, we understand it as an adaptation, a kind of timing similar to that which occurs among musicians in a band or orchestra.

When the concept of timing is used in performing arts contexts, it is briefly about the ability to listen and adapt one's actions to an ongoing event. In musical collaboration, timing is about listening, being responsive, and at the same time being active and contributing. Playing together with others is about listening to them in order to know when and how to make one's contribution. It is based on a desire to contribute but also on a sensitivity to the value of what is already happening. The adaptability in that adjustment becomes significant for groove to occur. Achieving groove can even be the ultimate goal of playing together in music. Groove gives meaning to playing music. It becomes easy to play together when it is groovy—not easy in the sense that the music does not challenge the musicians’ technical skill, but easy in the sense of being enjoyable and meaningful. We understand the prerequisite for groove as a kind of confidence; those playing together have formed a we with their fellow musicians so that a playful atmosphere can take place. The confidence does not have to be about knowing each other well or being a generally confident person. The confidence we are talking about here is related to playfullness; feeling like a we with those you are playing with in that particular moment—that is, being part of the play. Playfulness and confidence, in our opinion, are the foundations for groove. At the same time, groove is something more than its added components. Because groove gives meaning, it is natural for musicians to strive to achieve groove. Skilled musicians achieve groove musically with quite small efforts. They have time, meaning they have practiced their timing and make their contributions in a relaxed and playful manner.³¹

We perceive a difference in empathic timing compared to how other forms of empathy are usually described. Someone with empathic timing uses their emotional life to feel with the other, but they also let the emotion play a role in affecting when and how they act in the situation. Perhaps the description of Erika's actions seems somewhat cool. Perhaps her actions are not perceived as an example of empathy at all; but if we understand empathic timing as a practice, it is reasonable to think that empathic timing is using one's emotional sensibility to understand one or more persons (or beings) so that one can act wisely in relation to them. Empathic timing does not necessarily lead to action—or rather, the action it leads to can consist in doing nothing, that is, to refrain from acting. Letting things take their course or refraining from intervening in sympathy, what Lipps understood as Einsfühlung, does not have to be a sign that one does not care or understand the person in front of them. It can be a sign of taking responsibility.

Conclusion

In our article, we have discussed the meaning of empathetic timing in and for the context of early childhood education. We have explored various contemporary and partly contradictory understandings of empathy within empathy research. Subsequently, based on Stein's phenomenological-descriptive understanding of the different levels of empathy and Ingold's idea of landscape and traces, we have tried to unfold our concept of empathic timing as a practice of listening and adapting actions to an ongoing event. Yet, there is still an open question about the limits of empathy and the presupposition that professionals need to be able to perform empathetic timing. We take empathetic timing as an ontological concept that describes how subjects relate to each other. But it can also be used as an operative concept. A concept that provides a way of speaking about a phenomenon, reflecting, and scrutinizing it.

So, why is an understanding of empathy where timing is given importance “better” for professionals, one might ask. Why would this way of working be less emotionally exhausting? Such a question is, of course, justified, and we do not mean that empathic timing is the solution to addressing ethical stress or exhaustion among preschool staff. We know that the great commitment that many working in preschools feel for the children can be exploited by an employer. If language is given for a phenomenon that was previously implicit in practice and this phenomenon is then elevated as something “particularly good” (you have such a nice empathic timing!), an unreasonable workload may feel a bit lighter for an individual educator, without the system that created the unreasonable workload being rectified. That is not the intention of our study; the concept should not contribute to such a simplified view of the problem of compassion fatigue. Rather, we want to contribute to the discussion about educators’ professional knowledge and professional judgment having more space in the discussion of how preschools should be organized and developed.

Notes