Friday, February 5, 2016 | 12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Neville Scarfe Building, Room 310
All are welcome to attend. Light lunch and refreshments will be served.
Empathy is a core competency for engaging in authentic dialogue and creating intercultural understanding. It is thus an essential element of any well-functioning, pluralistic, democratic society. Engaged Philosophical Inquiry (EPI), an inquiry based teaching method, has been used to foster a democratic culture, specifically through the enhancement of critical and creative thinking, perspective taking and other socio-emotional competencies. This talk outlines several ongoing research projects around EPI at UBC. Preliminary results from a research project called ‘Measuring the Impact of EPI on Empathy and Perspective Taking’ will be discussed.
ABOUT DR. BARBARA WEBER
Dr. Barbara Weber has a Diploma magna cum laude in Social Work from the State University of Applied Sciences in Munich, Germany, and a Ph.D. magna cum laude from the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, Germany.
Before coming to UBC, she was a professor at the University of Regensburg, Germany and established the teaching chair for Values Education and Civic Engagement. She has been an Associate Professor for Human Development, Learning and Culture in the Department of Educational & Counselling Psychology, and Special Education at UBC since 2012.
Dr. Weber’s areas of specialization are engaged philosophical inquiry and other inquiry based teaching methods, democratic education, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and human and children’s rights. Since 2012, she has published three single authored books, 12 book chapters, and three journal articles, as well as edited two books. She founded the Engaged Philosophical Inquiry Consortium (EPIC) in 2012 and became the Co-Director of the Vancouver Institute for Philosophy of Children.