Cultivating Empathy Through Bilingual Education: How Experiencing the Other Through Their Language Builds Perspective-taking Skills, And Why It Matters

This explores how learning in two languages builds tools—specifically the cognitive tool of perspective-taking—that foster empathy. Research will be presented on the role of perspective-taking, its positive correlation with empathy, and how the bilingual classroom can train this skill. This discussion revisits existing research on bilingual schools in Israel in order to demonstrate how students’ experiences in bilingual learning environments have contributed to their perspective-taking capabilities, and how this might potentially contribute to the larger project of conflict resolution.