Creative Play for Teaching Empathy to Young Children - A Doctoral Dissertation Documentary of Play Pedagogy, Empathy, Inclusion, and Equity

Educating Empathy

SissyMarySue Education Fund 501 (c) (3) Nonprofit- Public Charity offers the complete audio on our PODCAST -Educating Empathy- of:
Creative Play for Teaching Empathy to Young Children
( a doctoral dissertation- documentary of play pedagogy, empathy and inclusion/equity )
This is rich with play and other research that can support the implementation of it for our youth in education and beyond!

Our nonprofit website www.SissyMarySue.org has links to our PODCASTS.

The FUTURE of Research Presentation &
Representation in Research ….
This is the research of our FOUNDER Dr. Wendy Muhlhauser-Tingblad ProQUEST published and video posted on YOUTUBE 2021! These are her comments. "I believe a documentary film format will be more common in the future for doctoral scholars in a multimedia era! We hope it will help lead the way for more research to be presented this way! I also hope it will lead the way for more ethnographic research to help all voices and life experiences to be included in higher education research to truly reflect everyone!!"
"Higher Education remains white male dominated which is not an accurate representation of our country or world!"
BELOW is the link to the documentary film. I have included the citation and abstract! It will still resonate today! Somehow it seems important that we share this!

ABSTRACT: Operating from the hypothesis that much of our prejudice and inequality results from a lack of empathy, my dissertation answers the research question: What reflective insights emerge from an autoethnographic study of creative story-telling and play, in online teaching of elementary grade children? This autoethnographic study, with video component, examines my online teaching and experiences that emphasize playfulness, empathy, diversity and inclusion, 11 the context of education and for general youth development. Through the use of documentary style presentation, I offer excerpts of me teaching, an online version of storytelling and play, as learning tools to facilitate the understanding of empathy and shared humanity. I provide a recorded narrative of my reflections that I film, in addition to a prose introduction. The dissertation has three main dimensions: a) Excerpts of recorded online teaching of just me (no children are seen and portions of already existing footage of interviews, b) Narrative of reflections for class planning, personal and academic discoveries, teaching, and other data comprised of journal entries, personal reflections, poetry, c) Intro, citations of research, literature review, and conclusions. I believe my illustrations will make for unique connections between playfulness and the development of empathy.

Keywords: Play, creative play, empathy, education, K-6 education, online teaching.

puppets, story, storytelling, hierarchy, discrimination, prejudice, inequality.

APA Citation:

Muhlhauser, W. J. (2021). Creative Play for Teaching Empathy to Young Children: an Inner Exploration of an Instructor’s Process, a Visual and Narrative Journey (Doctoral dissertation, Fielding Graduate University).

Link to VISUAL version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7evfLBX9Pos&t=26s

Find the written version on ProQuest under Wendy Muhlhauser. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/creative-play-teaching-empathy-young-children/docview/2510326346/se-2

Music by De'Arris Wayne Judkins (DRS), Chad Ihlenfeldt, Sara Guhl, and Anthony Hotakainen. Production and editing of documentary and podcast by Wendy Muhlhauser and Anthony Hotakainen.