A central problem in schooling is not necessarily ineffective instruction or outdated grading practices, but a lack of attunement to students as learners and human beings (Murdoch et al., 2020). In many classrooms, students are asked to perform, comply, and produce evidence of learning within systems that remain largely unresponsive to their emotional experience, self-perceptions, lived experiences, and developmental need for agency (Immordino-Yang, 2015). As students move through school, their need for emotional connection, self-direction, and self-reliance increases, yet educational structures often become less responsive to those needs (Bandura, 1997; Ryan & Deci, 2020). The result is a persistent mismatch: schools grow highly attentive to outcomes while remaining insufficiently attuned to the individual producing them. In short, schooling requires not more empathy in disposition and culture, but more empathy in pedagogical design.

Empathy, often underestimated as a design principle, offers a coherent response to these gaps across the full spectrum of the classroom experience. Empathy is not softness or diminished rigor; it is the deliberate effort to understand how students are experiencing learning: how they feel about a learning moment, what they believe about their own competence (efficacy), where they feel connected or alienated, and what conditions allow them to engage with candor and commitment. When teachers design learning experiences empathetically, instruction becomes more responsive, feedback becomes more relational and more responsive to the learner (Carless & Winstone, 2023; Hattie & Timperley, 2007), and curriculum becomes more meaningfully connected to who students are. Critically, empathy is not an interpersonal add-on to instruction; it should function as a guiding principle in the design of educational practice (Noddings, 2005, 2012).

In curriculum and instruction, empathetic design asks educators to consider not just what students will learn, but how they are likely to experience it. This means anticipating where students will feel connected or disoriented, confident or overwhelmed, and building instructional structures around those realities rather than dismissing them. It means designing sequences that honor emotional readiness alongside academic expectations and recognizing that students whose inner lives go unacknowledged in a learning environment consistently underperform relative to what the curriculum assumes they can do (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2007). Designing with an empathy lens is not remediation; it is proactive attunement.

In feedback, an empathy focus shifts the teacher’s orientation from evaluation alone to full relational response. Feedback designed with empathy attends to what students produced and how they felt about that moment, how they see themselves as a learner, and how supported they feel by the teacher. In other words, empathy in feedback can be both more precise and more likely to be acted upon because it feels more personal (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Noddings, 2012; Wisniewski et al., 2020). Students who receive feedback that resonates with their present emotions are more likely to act on that feedback (Yeager et al., 2014). Empathetic feedback is not encouragement without critique; it is critique that seeks to connect learning to the emotional responses it elicits.

Empathetic assessment design expands the evidentiary scope of assessment beyond academic performance to include four dimensions of student experience embedded within the assessment itself: self-evaluation (students’ judgments of their own performance relative to criteria), self-appraisal (affective reflection on confidence, uncertainty, or emotional state in the moment of performance), self-expression (content: structured opportunities to communicate thinking, questions, or perspective

that conventional formats leave uncaptured) and self-expression (personal: structured opportunities to share information about their lives). Rather than capturing only what students can do, empathy in assessment design better captures how students are emotionally experiencing a learning moment, making it possible for teachers to respond with greater precision, humanity, and accuracy (Immordino-Yang, 2015). Empathy, in this sense, is not an affective preference but a validity concern: without attunement to the learner’s experience, the evidence we collect from assessments risks misrepresenting what students know and can do. For a full treatment of the EAD framework, its theoretical grounding in social cognitive theory and equitable assessment research, and its classroom applications, see Reibel (2025).

Empathy, as a design principle, reorients pedagogy. When schooling is designed only around what students produce, it systematically undervalues who they are. Empathetic design does not soften that demand; it sharpens it by attending to the conditions under which learning becomes possible. Instruction that anticipates how students will experience content, feedback that speaks to who the learner is and not only what they did, and assessment that creates space for students to be known rather than merely measured are preconditions for durable learning.

The argument is not that schools should use empathy to make their culture feel warmer. It is that schools cannot produce the depth of learning they claim to pursue while remaining structurally indifferent to the emotional realities of the students inside them. Empathy in pedagogical design is, ultimately, a commitment to accuracy. Knowing what a student can do requires first understanding what it is like to be that student in the moment of learning.

RCEN NEWSLETTER 01/2025

In The Relational Dimension of the Teaching Profession, we follow four teachers who meet their students in a particularly evolving way. Deploying what is described as pedagogical tact and stance, the author has filmed teachers in order to observe how they create pedagogical meeting spaces wherein the teachers and students meet as people, thus developing an understanding of trustful, relational teaching in practice.

The relational dimension of the teaching profession is something that has hitherto played a hidden role in teacher education.

Nevertheless, well-functioning teacher-student relationships are a fundamental part of successful teaching. Including a multi-relational perspective on teaching and education (Pedagogical Relational Teachership, or, PeRT) as well as a taxonomy with an observation scheme for student teachers and researchers, this book is aimed at student teachers at undergraduate and advanced levels and is also suitable for teachers in practice. 

"Dr. Ljungblad’s new book is a significant contribution to the emerging field of relational pedagogy. Both her theorizing and her exquisite empirical work amply demonstrate what a possibility opens if we take relationships in education seriously. It is a must-read for all interested in the teaching profession and in education."

The overarching research question for this thesis is: In what way can student teachers' emotional experiences be considered a pedagogical phenomenon in teacher education? This overarching research question is explored through the following two sub-questions: • What characterizes student teachers' emotional experiences during their teacher education? • How can these experiences be taken care of in teacher education as a condition of possibility regarding the students´ Bildung process? The study's theoretical perspectives are mainly based on John Dewey's (1980; 1895) concept of experience and his understanding of emotions as a changeable, integrated, and necessary phase of every experience. In addition to this, the theoretical framework is phenomenologically informed, starting from Knud Ejler Løgstrup's (1956;1984; 1987;1996) concepts of omnipresence and attunement, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (2009) perspectives on intentionality, and in Dan Zahavi's (2003) perspectives on intersubjectivity. Furthermore, in Peter Goldie's (2000) understanding of the intentionality of emotions and finally in existential phenomenology with Søren Kierkegaard's (2014) and Paul Tillich's (2000) definitions of the term existential anxiety.