International Journal of Emotional Education

13 - 30

Authors: Susann Fegter and Claudia Mock

“My most special place is my home(land) country [“Heimatland”], because there I always feel so comfortable.” The spatial dimension of children´s well-being has been receiving more attention in child well-being research recently. Empirical studies show for example the effects of the built and natural environments on children´s objective and subjective well-being or the subjective meanings that children attach to the concept of well-being in respect to place and space. What is not well understood so far is the cultural dimension of these phenomena and understandings. The aim of this paper is therefore to outline a cultural analytical approach to the spatial constitution of well-being and to provide analytical heuristics to reconstruct the spatial constitution of well-being as a cultural construct in discursive practices that children take part in. The paper also provides an empirical example that illustrates this heuristic approach and shows how belonging(s) are constituted as a spatial construct beyond local and national territories. The paper ends with a summary of how the findings and the cultural approach might inform child well-being research and the spatial (re)constitution of well-being in the context of migration and digital technologies.

49 -66

Authors: Dagmar Kutsar, Kadri Soo and Liis-Marii Mandel

International quantitative studies among children, such as the Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children and the Programme for International Student Assessment have revealed a gap between learning outcomes and children’s subjective well-being across countries. The Children’s Worlds international study showed that liking school decreases from the second to the sixth grade. Compared to other countries the decrease is one of the biggest among schoolchildren in Estonia. The aim of the study is to find in-depth evidence to explain the low level of satisfaction with school life and reasons for the decrease in children liking school in Estonia. The analysis is based on data from eight focus group interviews with 12-year-old children in rural and urban schools. The study showed that children develop negative feelings from various aspects of school life that leads to criticism and a dislike for school. Bullying among children and behavioural shortcomings of teachers (including coping with personal distress) are the key factors that decrease the well-being of many children and cause a dislike of school. An ideal school-for well-being would promote physical, social and mental well-being for both children and teachers.

84 - 96

Authors: Elizabeth Huynh and Ashley Stewart-Tufescu

This purpose of this study was to explore how school-aged children understand dimensions of wellbeing in a Canadian context in participation of the Multi-national Qualitative Study – Children’s Understanding of Wellbeing. Twenty-one school-aged children (boys = 8, girls = 13) participated in semi-instructed interviews facilitated by tactile, tasked oriented interview tool. Participants were recruited from seven before- and-after-school child-care programs throughout the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The wellbeing of children at school was influenced by the quality of the relationships they had with their teachers. Children recognized teachers as being essential agents in their learning process and teaching them essential skills for their future. Children who described feeling positive about school were children who felt that their teachers were supportive, provided creative ways to learn, and listened to their ideas and concerns. Conversely, children who described negative feelings about school discussed experiencing teachers who did not value their ideas and concerns, and were not supportive in their individual needs as a learner. The teaching style of teachers affect children’s wellbeing at school. Teachers who promote wellbeing at school and positive feeling associated with learning are those who consider the voices and needs of their students, as well as make efforts to incorporate those considerations in their curriculum.

115 - 134

Authors: Gabrielle Drake, Michel Edenborough, Jan Falloon, Tobia Fattore, Rhea Felton, Jan Mason and Lise Mogensen

The emotional aspects of children’s social relations have generally been marginalised in social science discourse. Children, who participated in the Australian segment of the Children’s Understandings of Well-being (CUWB) project used various media to ‘voice’ the importance for their well-being of emotional relatedness with family, friends, animals and places. In this paper we place our construction of children’s discussion of emotional relatedness in the context of the ‘emotional turn’ in research and briefly describe how the methodology for our project facilitated an understanding of the importance of children’s emotions for their lives in the present. We then focus on the significance for child protection policy and practice, of what children tell us about feeling safe, as this relates to the importance of agency and relatedness with people and also with places.

153 - 168

Authors: Jonas Aspelin

A rapidly growing body of research reveals that teachers’ abilities to build positive relationships with students play a vital role in education. However, there is a lack of research regarding teacher education. This article aims to contribute by reporting from a project focusing on pre-service teachers’ relational competence. More specifically, it focuses on a phenomenon labelled socio-emotional competence. The first section discusses meanings of the concept, using a relational framework, and it highlights three aspects: i) the teacher acts sensitively and responsively; ii) the teacher is directly present to the student and manages feelings; and iii) the teacher confirms the student and supports the student’s emotional development. The next section discusses indications of improvement in pre-service teachers’ socio-emotional competence, based on data from an intervention study using digital video as the main method. The findings show that pre-service teachers’ relational understandings improved in several respects: they began to use a variety of words for specific emotions, to understand emotions as aspects of interaction, and to support their interpretations with behavioral cues. The concluding section considers why the intervention was successful and why socio-emotional competence seems to play a subordinate role in teacher education.