Empathy and why it's important in educationEmpathy is the ability to imagine yourself in someone else's place other and guess what that person feels (Pink, 2006). Rather than simply sympathizing, empathy allows us to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and truly feel what they are feeling. This indirect meaning allows us to better understand people and their experiences. Understanding others and their experiences is vital in education. Whether it's different races, religions, genders, etc., empathy offers us a path to a generalized understanding of others that even language cannot. In a study conducted by Dr. Nicolas Danziger of the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology and Center de la Douleur de la Pitié -Salpêtrière in Paris, France, on patients with congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), it was found that patients CIP were able to empathize with those experiencing pain when emotional cues were present. Dr. Danziger and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain for this study which showed that "their findings highlight the major role of midline structures in emotional perspective taking and the ability to understand feelings of someone else despite the absence of any understanding. previous personal experience” (Cell Press, 2009). Empathy is intrinsically linked to emotions and allows us to “feel” things that we have never actually experienced. Legendary psychologist Paul Ekman demonstrated in a 1965 study how facial expressions are universal and that universality allows everyone to connect to the emotions felt by the person shown in the images. In Ekman's study, he used a chart with facial expressions and showed them to subjects from America, Japan...... middle of paper ...... project even helps those who haven't read the book to try and connect with a character (and hope to spark enough interest to get them to read it). Empathy is an essential skill for success in the conceptual age. If we want to be able to work and live together in today's world, we must do everything we can to understand those around us. This video project is a great tool to promote empathy and provide students with a more meaningful academic encounter. This causes students to think about others with a completely different approach than what they are used to. This project gets students to care about the characters in the stories they read because they put themselves in their shoes. They experience what they experience, love what they love, fear what they fear, and generally feel what they feel. What's more meaningful than that??