Empathy is considered in the literature to be crucial to any successful therapeutic engagement. But how to teach, learn and ‘do’ empathy seems much less clear. Susan Gair discusses how, through the use of selected narratives in a classroom-based inquiry, second-year social work students at a regional Australian university were guided to define the concept of empathy and to reflect on their ability to empathise. Findings illuminated some students' compassionate empathy, while many others demonstrated conditional empathy or even an apparent lack of it with regard to certain life experiences, including those of past birth mothers. These serendipitous findings have implications for adoption practice and beyond.
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