Rocco Quaglia

The Pupil-Teacher Relationship and Gender Differences in Primary School

In the perspective of multiple attachment bonds, the teacher-child relationship is considered as one of the fun- damental ways to express a crucially relevant bond for the childs emotive and cognitive development. The contextualist approach underlines how the dynamics of interaction between the individual and micro-sociocultural contexts play a me- diating role on developmental processes. Studies by Pianta, in particular, ascribed to the teacher-pupil interaction a crucial developmental function in the adaptation of the child, both in preschool age children and in the subsequent years of pri- mary school. The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of the teacher-pupil relationship when the teacher is male in the primary school setting. There were 310 children involved, equally distributed by gender, with their 52 teachers, of whom 42 were female and 10 were male. The analyses carried out reveal statistically relevant differences between the two groups of teachers on the issue of the way male teachers assess their relationship with female pupils. More than their male colleagues, female teachers tend to evaluate girls in a significantly different way as far as closeness and dependency are concerned. The data that emerges calls for careful consideration of the effect that the gender imbalance marking the teaching population in the early stages of schooling can have on aspects of child development.

A new theory on children's drawings: Analyzing the role of emotion and movement in graphical development

The aim of this paper is to develop a new understanding of childrens drawings and to provide ideas for future research in early childhood. Starting from classic theories on child graphical development, we proceed to analyze them and provide our own views on the subject. We will also recount a number of relevant empirical studies that appear to validate our theory. Our belief is that emotion and self-expression through movement play a key role in the development of child art, and that this may be already visible during the scribbling stage of drawing.

Names in Psychological Science: Investigating the Processes of Thought Development and the Construction of Personal Identities.

This paper examines the name as an issue of interest in the psychology field. In thinking about the role played by names for some of the most important approaches on the psychology panorama, it has been found that the analysis of names can be used as an instrument for the investigation of thought formation processes, or as an element in the process of constructing personal identity. In the first case, the focus is on the so-called “common” names, which designate objects; in the second case, instead, it is on people’s given names and on the way they are perceived by their bearers and those who surround them. We have examined both domains, since it is essential to understand how the psychological concepts related to names develop in children’s minds, if we aim to grasp their importance as designators of people’s internal and external realities. Lastly, we have proposed our own view of the person’s name, linked to the relational systems perspective which essentially sees the name as a signifier or “representative” of the child-parent relationship, while the “relationship” is the signified.

Reconsidering the scribbling stage of drawing: a new perspective on toddlers' representational processes

Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the “actual” drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a childs development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young childrens gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the childs relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more “alive” on the paper, but only in the childs own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on childrens graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0–3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them.

Parent–teacher meetings as a unit of analysis for parent–teacher interactions

The attempt to establish the decisive factors in psychological research, from an idiographic perspective, firstly involves examining the meanings entailed in this epistemological paradigm. Specifically, our work sets out to assess the possibilities of using this perspective with reference to parent–teacher relationships, as expressed through parent–teacher meetings. Said meetings present their own specific features which distinguish them from all the other kinds of meetings examined in literature (clinical, orientational, educational). Since many studies on this subject (parent–teacher communications; parent–teacher meetings, parent–teacher relationships) have focused mostly on the conversational aspects, it seemed time for a deeper theoretical and methodological examination of the specific characteristics of this instrument. Parent–teacher meetings have some particular features that make them a possible subject of idiographic analysis: firstly, it is a phenomenon that occurs at the dynamic meeting point between the life experiences of different individuals, brought together by their shared focus on the same matter of interest. Here we intend to describe, from a theoretical point of view, parent–teacher meetings as a relevant object of study and a possible context for future interventions.

The Transition from Crawling to Walking: Can Infants Elicit an Alteration of Their Parents' Perception?

Our study was designed to address a gap in the literature on parents’ perception and motivation to protect their infants from potential risk of injury in the transition from crawling to walking. The participants were 260 Italian subjects, of whom 158 were women and 102 men, aged between 20 and 45 years. They were asked to draw two domestic objects (a kitchen table and a CD cover) to assess the possible alterations in the perception of environmental elements seen by the parents as a potentially dangerous cause of unintentional injury for their child. Analysis showed that the group of mothers with children aged 9–18 months had drawn the largest tables, while the table areas of the other two categories of women were much smaller. As for the males, the group that drew the largest tables was the one with children, but not in the age range of 9–18 months, while there was little difference between the other two groups. The final descriptive analysis concerned the average scores on the STAI-Y tests both for state and trait anxiety. In all groups a substantial parity was observed, except for the non-parent men, who had a lower level of state anxiety. Both the fathers and the mothers of children aged 9–18 months obtained lower scores, both for state and trait anxiety. Based on the findings, we demonstrate that children transitioning from crawling to walking can elicit a perceptive reactivity in their mothers, which satisfies their natural need to protect their offspring.