The Empathy Project.

We need to focus less on reading words and more on reading people.
True education is the ability to understand another human being.
-Tami Rae Weiss, PhD

For the past several years, I have researched and shared my work with arts integration as a way of teaching empathy. At the center of this work is what I describe as an often untaught but essential literacy: aesthetic literacy, or the language of lived experience. I see aesthetic literacy as vital to education because it helps students communicate and find meaning through images, emotions, and expressive forms, each of which we can learn to “read.”

My instructional resources have been used by early childhood educators and parents to help children develop compassion, empathy, and emotional regulation. I emphasize facial expression as a kind of universal emotional language, one that can communicate joy, sadness, fear, anger, and more in an instant. Learning to read those expressions is one of the foundations of empathy. Through books, posters, and visual learning tools, I create engaging ways for children to identify, name, and better understand feelings.

Multimedia Keynote Presentation.

In 2018, I was selected as the keynote speaker for the regional Early Childhood Conference in Wisconsin, where I presented “Understanding Empathy Through the Arts.” My doodle-based visual designs were featured throughout the conference in posters, videos, and t-shirts, extending the ideas of the presentation into the visual identity of the event.

Peter Yarrow (right) and his son sing/strum “Don’t Laugh at Me” with Weiss’s slideshow, featuring images of local schoolchildren.

“Don’t Laugh At Me”
Anti-bullying program with Peter Yarrow

As part of my broader commitment to the arts as essential to personal well-being and cultural change, I collaborated with Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary on his Operation Respect anti-bullying program.

Drawing from my work with local teachers, I developed a multimedia presentation focused on teaching empathy through the arts. It included photographs of students’ nonverbal responses to the question, What does it feel like to be bullied? I then worked with Yarrow to incorporate a multimedia slideshow into his live performance of “Don’t Laugh at Me.” The result was a deeply moving and powerful presentation.