Helen Demetriou

Moral sensibility, understanding others, and children's friendship interactions in the preschool period

The relations between childrens views on the permissibility of transgressions involving friends, and their justifications concerning such views, and individual differences in their socio-cognitive and temperamental characteristics and family background were studied in 128 4-year-old children (64 pairs of friends) from a wide range of social backgrounds. Children were interviewed about the permissibility of a series of transgressions between friends, tested on a battery of theory of mind, emotion understanding and language assessments, and filmed as they played with a close friend. Views on permissibility and moral justifications were not closely linked. Justification that took account of interpersonal issues was correlated with understanding of mental states and emotions, with behavioural and temperamental characteristics, and with the quality of interaction between the friends. Views on permissibility were related to understanding of inner states, but also independently to parental education and occupation, with those from more highly educated and professional families more likely to judge transgressions as not permissible. Girls were more likely than boys to justify their views in terms of interpersonal issues, differences not explained by verbal ability differences. Regression analyses highlighted the association between girls’ justifications and their understanding of emotions in close relationships, while those of boys were correlated with their understanding of mental states. The significance of understanding inner states for childrens moral sensibility, and the possible social processes implicated, are discussed.

Academic performance, transfer, transition and friendship: listening to the student voice

Abstract Research and practice have tended to focus on the “entrance and exit” years in schools. Transfer (that is, the move from one stage of schooling and from one school to another) has received more attention than transition (that is, the move from one year to another within the same school). Transition emerges from interviews with students as a neglected but important experience, reflecting the difficulties some students have in sustaining their commitment to learning and in understanding continuities in learning. Similarly, the relationship between friendships and student progress is given attention at transfer but tends thereafter to have a low profile. Interviews with students suggest that there is much that we can usefully learn by listening to students talk about the link between friendship and academic performance.

New teacher learning: substantive knowledge and contextual factors

This article brings together an overview of ideas about teacher learning from both teacher education and workplace learning literature, and examines what and how newly qualified secondary school teachers learn in the early years of their career. We discuss the types of knowledge new teachers encounter and present a typology of teacher learning. The article also draws on a three-year longitudinal study, presenting findings from surveys of new and more experienced teachers together with analysis of interviews with ten new teachers during the first two years of their teaching career. We present findings about how these new teachers have learned in their first two years of teaching and explore the importance of the school context and other learning factors. Suggestions for future research are also included.

The role of emotion in teaching: are there differences between male and female newly qualified teachers’ approaches to teaching?

Emotions play a crucial role in communication and engagement between people. This paper focuses on the extent to which new teachers consider and value the emotional component of teaching for the engagement and motivation of their students and themselves. Moreover, drawing on the literature on gender and emotion, which consistently cites females of all ages as having a greater capacity to empathise, we looked to see if female teachers are better equipped at engaging their students and whether there are differences in the emotional teaching styles of male and female newly qualified teachers. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were employed. Analysis of questionnaires revealed significant gender difference in approaches to teaching and perceptions of it, and led us to pursue this issue further by interviewing a selection of the teachers. Teachers’ comments reflected differences between men and women in the ways they visualise the role of emotion in teaching. When faced with challenges and adversities in the classroom, such as disruptive and disengaged students, they employ different strategies to combat them, and typically, female teachers would go to greater lengths, often employing emotion tactics to re‐engage students. The research highlights the importance of focusing on emotional engagement in teaching, the consequences for teacher retention and implications for teacher training.

Children should be seen and heard: the power of student voice in sustaining new teachers

Recent research has highlighted the merits of consulting children in both primary and secondary schools about their teaching and learning. This article looks at the effectiveness of pupil voice in not only maximizing the potential of pupils and students but also the consequences for helping teachers in turn — and especially newly qualified teachers, who might encounter obstacles during their early months of teaching. Interviews were conducted with 11 secondary school science teachers in their first three years of teaching in order to ascertain the quality of teaching and the degree to which teachers felt that they were successful in communicating the subject matter to their students. The findings showed that consulting young people is one way of responding to the needs of teachers as well as to the pupils themselves and we discuss the potential of pupil voice in harnessing the thoughts and feelings of pupils and ultimately achieving effective teaching and learning.

Attachment and Empathy from the Home to the Classroom: Listening to Learners

This chapter moves from the home to the classroom, contextualising the attachment process between teacher and pupil and incorporating lessons from attachment theory for a-ffective as well as e-ffective teaching and learning. The chapter advocates the importance of involving children and young people in their education and listening to pupil voice, listening to learners, so that children should be seen and heard. A ‘Toolbox’ that contains a selection of methods to elicit pupil voice is described. Asking what’s in it for pupils, teachers and schools, this chapter describes the importance of consultation, participation and pupil research, learning from the student perspective and the transformative potential, as well as the importance of instilling a language for learning, ownership of learning and school as a democratic community.

The Empathy Factor: Its Transcending Power

This chapter is a general introduction to empathy and its transcending power as depicted through people, art, literature, philosophy and science. It looks at how its name originated and contextualises it in a variety of different spheres of life. Empathy is illustrated using present day definitions and is conceptualised through its emotional and cognitive components.

A Study of Empathy in the Early and Middle Childhood Years

This chapter investigates children’s reactions to distress in the early and middle childhood years. Early childhood is investigated with a focus on personal responsibility, similarity with the peer, familiarity of the peer and experience with other children. The contextual study of empathy in middle childhood examines cognitive empathy as the understanding of distress, and emotional empathy as feelings for distress, and reactions from helpful recommendations to aggressive suggestions. The research looks at associations between cognitive understanding and vicarious emotion, as to whether empathy is a valid construct and whether empathy is indeed the focus of investigation.

A Tale of Two Studies: Features of Friendships and Awareness of Fairness

This chapter illustrates the previous chapter’s toolkit, pupil consultation and pupil voice through two studies that investigate features of friendships and awareness of fairness. Specifically, two friendship studies are described as conducted by visiting researchers and also by schools themselves. The fairness research is contextualised with literature that links morality with empathy as well as the implications for studying unfairness in education. The research probed for incidents, both experienced and observed, that pupils considered to be unfair, as well as their responses to them, and has implications for pupils’ abilities to share in the emotional experiences of their learning.

Emerging Empathy: A Developmental Perspective

This chapter gives a developmental perspective of empathy. Beginning with egocentrism and the early confusion between self and other, the chapter then describes research that depicts babies’ abilities to accentuate the positive with apparent baby morality and social skills. Emerging empathy is described and in particular the capacity for both feeling and understanding others’ situations, as is the variety of actions that ensue as a result of the feeling and understanding of emotions. Specific mention is afforded to the role of cognition in the developmental course of empathy as perspective-taking, and the role of affect in the developmental course of empathy as vicarious emotion. Additional mention is made of theory of mind as a special case of perspective-taking; and other classifications of emotional empathy, of sympathy, personal distress and emotional contagion. There is a section that describes the synthesis of affect and cognition, the coming together of feeling and understanding; and scenarios when empathy doesn’t emerge, of empathy imbalances from autism to psychopathy. Investigated next are the actions taken as a result of empathy, but considering also the enigmatic nature of the reasons behind empathy and the paradox that is the coexistence of altruism and egoism.