Developing Empathy Through an IMovie

Sometime for young people it is hard to have empathy for the people that lived through an event and what their experience were. They don't understand the people behind the stories, hardships people endured, or the emotions felt. Through pictures, clips, music, sounds bites students can start to understand what it is that people went through. Textbooks are a great tool to get a general start to the story, names, dates, places, however for people to understand what it was really like and how much others have gone through their needs to be a connection. Building this connection can come from comparing similar stories from the past to the present or having the students do an activity that makes them think more. Having actual pictures, music from the time, and even interviews of people that where there can also help students to begin to feel what it was like at that time in history. History isn't just names and dates its feeling and emotions. Creating your own educational IMovie can help bring history to life for these students. The movies we created in class brought out a lot of emotions for us even if we had seen those images a million times before. It puts you there in those peoples mind set and how would it feel if that was me on a ship at Pearl Harbor, or watching the first plane take off, or if i had been in NYC during 9/11 instead of my classroom in Rural Delphi, In. Even though I was alive and experienced 9/11 the movie that my classmates made brought it all back and it brought out more understanding of what really happened now that i'm older watching these things happen. Some times it takes time to young people to have empathy but as teachers we need to be able to help that process along and finding tools that can do this.