Ressources

This study aims to develop a global citizenship education program focused on empathy enhancement, apply it to Elementary School Students in Higher Grade, and reveal whether it has an effect on empathic ability improvement. A program development model was established for program development and along with literary review and common elements were drawn from global citizenship education programs that had previously been developed and applied to construct the final program. The developed program was applied to 60 fifth grade students and for effectiveness verification, pre and post tests were conducted on both the test group and control group. As a result, the test group participating in the program displayed more improvement in cognitive, emotional, and communicative empathy than the group before participating the program but the control group showed no change. Therefore, it was empirically shown that global citizenship education programs focusing on empathy enhancement do help to enhance the empathy of higher grade elementary school students and that they overcome the limitations of previous global citizenship education that simply provokes sympathy or only focuses on material support. Also, by combining counseling elements with global citizenship education, it implied synergy effects with counseling domains.