Research-based Personas: Teaching Empathy in Professional Education
Benjamin van Rooij, Shahron Williams · The Journal of Effective Teaching · 2012
Graduate students enrolled in professional education degree programs are increasingly challenged by the need to acquire the complex skills/competencies of their respective professions on the one hand, while retaining empathy for the individuals they will be serving on the other hand. This paper suggests a technique which uses the Persona, a narrative representation of a desired client’s or user’s behavior patterns that is grounded in the philosophy of User-centered Design (UCD), to integrate empathy into professional education, and includes an example from a graduate-level program in instructional design. Opportunities for adopting this technique in various disciplines at the undergraduate level are also identified.