Final Project for the Bachelor in Design, Class of 2021.
A digital management system for teachers of grades groups 3-5, 6-8, and 9-11 to improve relationships with their students through empathy building activities.
As the priorities of our education system shift tofit the incoming needs of 21st century students, intellectuals and scholars have recognized empathy as a crucial factor inholistic education and character development. One inhibitor of academic success that empathy can fix is a weak student/teacher relationship.
With the objective to improve upon such relationships with empathy building activities, the learning management system "Emonate" was created. To eliminate barriers in the way of one's ability to empathize with another, we can create an environment for which empathy is encouragedand actively used.
Emonate helps students and teachers communicate their emotional state via emojis in a private, honest, and non confrontational way with the use of an iPad and computer. By doing so, an emphasis is placed one motions and their effects on our mood so the teacher is able to better cater to the collective feelings of the class. The students will not only be able to know how the teacher is feeling, but have an idea of how their classmates are feeling as well.
Emonate provides teachers with a toolkit of activities that practice empathy with students while attempting to lift the overall mood of the classroom. These activities are as simple as teachers telling students a story in their life, participating in a mindfulness exercise, collectively listening to music together,or going for a walk to encourage non-academic conversations.
The measures for strengthened student/teacher relationships can beseen in non-academic interactions students and teachers share. Things like the number of drawings or gifts students give their teachers, the number of conversations they have outside of class, or improved responses on teacher evaluation surveys are all indicatorsof this. The hope is that, by the end of the year, students’ mood reports will trend upwards as a reflection of the careprovided by their teachers.
