Abstract
The concept of empathy has multiple meanings. In the present paper we present an experiment in which the relationship between empathy and spatial perspective Berthoz and Jorland (L’Empathie, 2004) acquires a significant role in the process of structural coupling Maturana and Varela (The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding, 1992) and Damiano (Unità in dialogo. Un nuovo stile per la conoscenza, 2009). The concept of empathy in education is at the basis of the relation between teacher and students and between teaching and learning. Thus the concepts of co-activity Vinatier and Numa-Bocage (Revue française de pédagogie, 158:85–101, 2007) and of structural coupling have analogies with empathy and can provide operational indications. The research question is the following: is it possible to detect the presence of a structural coupling and of empathic processes in a class of students and their teachers through the mediation of a conceptual space created by an automated AI system? The present contribution analyses the use of an AI plug-in developed within the European project I-TUTOR. In the experiment the artefact plays the role of mediator between the teacher and the students and lets their different perspectives be compared. The artefact does not engage in dialogue with the student in a one-to-one relationship, but it is a vertex of the student-artefact-teacher triangle. The artefact, an automated space, fosters a comparison between the perspective of the student and that of the teacher in relation to the dominant teaching object of the course. The paper describes the findings of the experiment run with two groups of students and proposes some changes to be worked into the plug-in to foster further empathic processes.
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Rossi, P.G., Fedeli, L. Empathy, Education and AI. Int J of Soc Robotics 7, 103–109 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0272-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0272-9