Empathy and prosociality: service-learning projects in social psychology

Abstract

Service-learning projects are an opportunity to work on both the empathy and the prosociality of university students. Transferring theoretical content to the real context in a practical way contributes to the acquisition of transversal skills of the subjects. The aim of this paper is to present experiences made with this methodology by a group of students of the subject of social psychology. They carried out several projects with different entities, although all of them were focused on responding to the needs of children and adolescents at risk of social exclusion, coming from problematic neighbourhoods and unstructured families, with hardly any resources to establish healthy interpersonal relationships. In these contexts, the university students detected problems of coexistence, lack of social cohesion, low emotional intelligence, presence of disruptive behaviors, scarce psycho-affective development and frustration with academic issues that affected both attention and behavior. The students’ intervention project to address this problem was carried out through networking with other NGOs and associations. It also focused basically on reinforcing the good practices that were already being carried out in the schools through school reinforcement, and they were taught to work as a team through games and sports activities. The results of this service contributed to improving children and adolescents’ social identity by working on their self-concept and self-esteem, promoting autonomy and strengthening skills to help them integrate into society without neglecting education in values such as solidarity, respect and responsibility. In addition, they learned tools such as negotiation and dialogue to solve their conflicts in the different areas of their lives. And the
students valued the methodology positively, thus developing prosociality and empathy, the result of the learning experience derived from it both on a personal and academic level.