Abstract
ABSTRACT Research on educational activities generally focuses on the importance of positive emotions in the interaction between teachers and children. This article will focus on the challenging emotions that can arise when kindergarten staff interact with the children. The empirical material has been collected from a qualitative study of conflicts between children and between children and the staff in four Norwegian kindergartens. The focus of the article is limited to children’s resistance in conflict situations with staff. The data material is based on the staff’s written narratives about their practice and focus-group interviews where they discuss their emotions and actions in events where children demonstrate resistance. The authors discuss how challenging emotions arise in everyday life in kindergarten, reasons for these emotions and how they may affect the development of professional judgment.
Highlights
This article, based on a Norwegian context, is about everyday life and the staff’s emotional reactions to children’s resistance
Recent research has highlighted challenges that might arise in conflict situations, which means that people have different perspectives, values or aims for their thoughts and actions (Doppler-Bourassa et al, 2008)
In the Scandinavian countries conflicts and resistance are considered important for democratic learning, where expressions of different interests, perspectives and resistance are important events in everyday life in kindergartens
Summary
This article, based on a Norwegian context, is about everyday life and the staff’s emotional reactions to children’s resistance. Research reveals that resistance from children can challenge teachers’ goals for activities and expectations for children’s behaviour (Johansson & Emilson, 2016; Skoglund, 2019). The aim for this article is to illuminate the staff’s perspectives on events where they experienced challenging emotions when meeting children’s resistance and to discuss how collective reflections about such experiences can contribute to development of professional judgement. Feelings are seen as one of the components connected to subjective judgments as they integrate the central representation of appraisal-driven response organisation in emotions All these five aspects of the emotions concept are relevant in the analysis of the empirical material and in the discussion on the importance of an awareness of challenging emotions and the development of professional judgement
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