Sympathy or empathy?

Over the last few months, I have been brooding over these two words - sympathy and empathy. The online dictionary has given several definitions of these words and so do many others. I also had a look at wordia.com which shows videos of people describing what these words (sympathy and empathy) mean to them. Unfortunately, sympathy does not yet have a video. This may probably mean that people can easily express sympathy to others but may find it difficult to empathise with others.

These words are very commonly used in our everyday life too. For example, we show our sympathy to our family members, friends and even strangers. This may make the recipient of sympathy feel better although I have no access to any research evidence that I can present here in order to support my view. On the other hand, it is often very difficult to find people who can empathise with others in the real sense. I keep on trying to put myself in a teenager's shoe to see if I can find out more about my son's feeling as he is in his early teenage. It doesn't seem impossible abut certainly very challenging. This actually reminds me of people who always look for sympathy towards them and never stop to think about whether the sympathiser can actually show his/ her sympathy to this person without impacting on themselves or others around them.

Not only our everyday life, I have found the concept of SYMPATHY very powerful in a professional setting too. A case in point is teachers' professional development when they find it difficult to empathise with their learners. As teachers, can we put ourselves into a learner's shoe? Would it help us with our teaching? And this reminds me of an article that I recently edited for the IATEFL ESP SIG, which talks about emotionally intelligent teachers - teachers with an ability to understand the emotional feelings of their students and respond to them accordingly. Perhaps, this idea can be applied to the teacher professional development project in Bangladesh, English in Action. Well I am still thinking... and you may be interested in reading more about empathy here.