Students experience and express different kinds of emotions in school everyday. One of these emotions is joy. When students experience and express joy, this often means that a positive atmosphere and pleasant interpersonal relations are prevailing in the school context. It is, therefore, important that we recognize joy in students and react accordingly. The empirical part of the master’s thesis focuses on the expression of joy in students from the 1. to the 5. grade. 114 students attending approximately 70 different primary schools in Slovenia from the 1. to the 5. grade participated in the conducted research. Based on a pre-formatted observation scheme, students were observed during class (for approximately 5 school hours) in situations, where they express joy, with emphasis on ways of expressing joy, the intensity of the emotion and the reactions of classmates and teachers to the joy of a student. An interview was conducted with twelve students (half girls and half boys) that attend the 4. and the 5. grade about their experience of joy in school. The observation (observation scheme) and self-reporting (interview) results showed that different situations aroused joy in students. The most frequent situations were those, where students were involved in a pleasant activity or a pleasant activity was announced; and those connected to the student’s success or the expectation of success. The observation and self-reporting results show that students express joy verbally (e.g. self-praise) and non-verbally (e.g. facial expressions). The observation and self-reporting results mostly matched in the descriptions of students’ verbal and non-verbal feedback. The differences between both ways of obtaining data were noticeable in the evaluation of the intensity of joy: students evaluated joy as more intense in comparison to the observers, who evaluated it in class. The observation and self-reporting results showed that schoolmates reacted to the joy of a student with the same emotion (joy) and with smiling/laughing. The students’ self-reports showed that teachers reacted to joy mostly non-verbally, while the observation results showed that teachers reacted to students’ joy mostly verbally. The obtained results enable a better understanding of the expression of joy in students from the 1. to the 5. grade. They can be of help to teachers when working with students’ emotions, especially with joy.
|
