THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHERS'S SOCIAL REPRESENTATION OF CHILD ON SOCIO-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Starting from the idea that social reality, including the educational reality, is the result of a permanent process of construction and reconstruction of meanings and practices, the study aims to explore the relationship between the teacher s social representations of the child and socio-emotional development in the second childhood. Investigating these social representations, we can better understand teacher s professional practice and perhaps even anticipate the course of child development on whom teacher actions are reflected. The study general hypothesis was: the content and structure of educator's social representations of a child (CSR), influence the development of socio-emotional skills of preschool children by supporting the occurrence of teacher-child interaction of "emotional support" type. The research methodology was a mixed one, combining qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and processing (free association method, essay method, observation method, prototypical analysis, thematic coding). Research findings were: the CSR content and structure outlines a "picture" of the pre-school child with an active functional dimension of the core, with predominantly positive elements, supporting a teacher-child interaction of "emotional support" and, implicitly, socio-emotional development in preschool children. Also, preschoolers have shown higher levels of emotional abilities, especially emotional consciousness, emotional expression, and prosocial behavior in the groups identified with higher level of two dimensions of teacher-child interaction: socio-affective climate dimension and teacher's sensitivity dimension. The research pointed out that there is a positive correlation between the level of socio-emotional development of preschoolers, the "emotional support" behavior of the teaching staff, and the structure and content of CSR. (C) 2019 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.UK