Interpersonal Relationships in Education

General project description

This theme covers several projects and educational courses. In cooperation with other universities, research is carried out and teaching programs are developed in the field of interpersonal relationships, mainly between teachers and students in primary and secondary education. Interpersonal relationships are conceptualised on the basis of Interpersonal Theory (Bakan, 1966; Fournier et al., 2011) and the adaptation of this theory for education (Wubbels et al., 2012; see figure or ).

The three cornerstones of the project are

research into measuring interpersonal perceptions and interactions in educational settings (process measures and questionnaires),
research into the implications of interpersonal processes for pupils and teachers, and
the training of teachers’ interpersonal competences.

The two most recent sub-projects in this line concern (cornerstone 2) a PhD research into the grounding professional well-being of teachers in daily physiological and interpersonal processes in the classroom (NWO-PROO 405-14-306) and (cornerstone 2 and 3) a NRO-practice-oriented review (NWO 405-18-632) into the significance of teacher-student interaction for the social position in the classroom of children with special educational needs.

Based on this project, several courses and educational units have been developed and are now provided in the teacher training programme of Utrecht ľ�ϸ��Ӱ�� and other institutes (cornerstone 3), for example the course 'Interaction in the Classroom' (academic primary teacher education program year 3) and the course 'Interpersonal Teacher Behaviour' (first degree university teacher training programme). Furthermore, the project team regularly provides national and international scientific and practice-oriented key-notes, workshops and master classes (e.g. ).

In total, this project line has, over the years, received external funding of approximately 1.5 million Euros in the form of separate project applications.