Page 208 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Designing for Interaction 191

force the positive environment created by the teacher. A positive, nurturing,
and enabling atmosphere, which supports all children, provides the model for
their own personal development and supports their relationships and empathy
with others. We believe that flexible classrooms designed to meet children’s
needs, to encourage a wide range of interaction and collaboration, to enable
the co-construction of ideas, presentation of ideas and subsequent reflection,
can help to support and nurture both the emotional, social and intellectual de-
velopment of children. The NIMIS classroom aimed to provide a variety of
opportunities for presentation, interaction and reflection through the provision
of a number of different shared workspaces, co-operative layout and also elec-
tronic interaction as well as affective support through the development of an
empathic agent who would combine the affective and the cognitive support
at the computer to supplement the human support available from teacher and
peers, thus maximising the interaction.

3. The Significance of Empathy

Developing a rich and sensitive understanding of every child requires con-
siderable empathy on the part of the teacher. Research into empathy and into
teaching and learning in the ’60s and ’70s explored the concept in considerable
depth and linked empathy with effective teaching. Aspy (1972) and Rogers
(1975), amongst others, highlighted the central nature of this quality not only
in teaching but in all caring relationships. Empathy is widely associated with
development and learning from intensely personal development during therapy
to intellectual, spiritual, creative and also moral development [12]. Teachers
are obliged both to discover a pupil’s existing skills or understanding in a par-
ticular subject area and extend them but in order to do this most effectively
they have to know the child as a person, know their confidence levels as well
as be aware of their academic understanding. They have to nurture their sense
of self and support their academic success, which can also further develop their
sense of self. They may also develop their students awareness of other people,
through simultaneously valuing them and opening their eyes to other attitudes
and understandings very different from their own. Empathy and the interaction
it involves therefore are central to developing understanding of subjects, skills
and of other human beings. The study on empathy in teacher/pupil relation-
ships is UK based and involved recorded interviews with pupils and teachers
and observations of them at work in the classroom using tape-recorders and
field notes [5]. Later, it involved secondary and primary schoolteachers of dif-
ferent genders and subject specialisms and degrees of responsibility who were
especially selected for their empathic approach to teaching and learning. Anal-
ysis followed grounded theory methodology [19]. These teachers understood