Promoting Historical Empathy and the Sociological Imagination: A Three-Phase Educational Framework

Theorists of the historical discipline widely agree that historical empathy is a key gateway to developing historical thinkers, but minimal research has focused on whether the skills students develop when contextualizing historical actors have the potential to become a foundation for understanding contemporary individuals and social structures. Through an analysis of educator interviews and secondary literature, this article proposes a three-phase framework that educators can use to both cultivate historical empathy within students, and translate these skills to current contexts. The first phase of this framework serves to initially educate students on the basic components of a historical event. The second phase encourages students to collaborate and draw conclusions about the consequences of said event or action, and make connections across contexts to other moments in time. Finally, the third phase is focused on connection making and wider context exploration. Here I hypothesize students could gain a deeper understanding of empathy as a whole, and use the lessons they have learned from historical events, their peers, and class discussions, to look towards current contexts and social dynamics. The main framework proposal offers that historical events and actors can be studied as “cases” in broader experiences, dynamics, and patterns across time and context. This framework contributes to the existing literature through proposing an approach to connect historical empathy and the sociological mind.