ADDING COLOR TO CONFLICT: Disruptive Students’ Drawings of Themselves with Their Teachers

Building on work examining teachers’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship, this study investigated how young students draw themselves with their teachers. Fourteen kindergarten and first-grade teachers each nominated 2 disruptive and 2 well-behaved students. Students then completed 1 draw...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Elementary school journal 2017-06, Vol.117 (4), p.642-663
Main Authors: McGrath, Kevin Francis, Van Bergen, Penny, Sweller, Naomi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior Problems
Color
Creativity
Elementary School Students
Elementary School Teachers
Freehand Drawing
Gender Differences
Grade 1
Kindergarten
Kindergarten students
Student Behavior
Teacher Student Relationship
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Building on work examining teachers’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship, this study investigated how young students draw themselves with their teachers. Fourteen kindergarten and first-grade teachers each nominated 2 disruptive and 2 well-behaved students. Students then completed 1 drawing of themselves with their classroom teacher and 1 with a support teacher (e.g., librarian, art teacher) at 2 time points: the end of the school year (Phase 1) and the beginning of the next year (Phase 2). In coding for 8 markers of relationship quality—vitality/creativity, pride/happiness, vulnerability, emotional distance, tension/anger, role reversal, bizarreness/dissociation, and global pathology—we found no differences in the way that disruptive and well-behaved students depicted their own relationships with teachers. Gender and phase effects were identified, however, with boys depicting greater relational negativity than girls and all students portraying greater emotional distance at the beginning of the school year.
ISSN:0013-5984
1554-8279
DOI:10.1086/691567