Contemporary research emphasizes the social and emotional aspects of education including the significance of positive teacher-student relationships and relational climate for student development, both learning, wellbeing and mental health (Durlak, 2011; O’Connor & McCartney, 2007; Rucinski, Brown, & Downer, 2017; Payton et al., 2008). Hence the classroom climate, defined by Buyse et al. (2008) as the average level of emotional support experienced by children, with high-quality emotional support being characterized by warmth, respect, positive affect, teacher sensitivity, and low levels of anger, sarcasm, and irritability is crucial for school students’ learning and thriving (Buyse et al., 2008; Breeman et al., 2015). Consequently, recent research and practice in the field of Social Emotional Learning has focused on how to advance educator’s social emotional capacities to enable them to establish positive relationships to their students (Durlak et al., 2015). Recently, such positive relationships and relational climate has been conceptualized in terms of a generative social field (Böll & Senge, 2016; Scharmer, 2009; Siegel, 2020).

With regard to the development of these competencies the effectiveness of whole-school approaches has been suggested (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). In order to investigate how positive whole-school changes in relational quality can be affected, our German-Danish research collaboration focuses on a longitudinal project “Empathie macht Schule” (EMS) (2020-2025) which aims to develop empathy and relational competence among the educators (including leaders) at three elementary schools in Berlin, Germany. We specifically focus both on the project’s impact on both educator and student socio-emotional capacities and wellbeing and closely follow the implementation process with repeated qualitative interviews.

The EMS training is carried by professional facilitators in six three day in-person modules across 1.5 years followed by a supervision phase. In comparison to other approaches, EMS specifically highlights the educator’s relational competence (Juul & Jensen, 2017), i.e. their capacity for emotional self-regulation, self-compassion, and the capacity to take care of own needs on the one hand, as well as the capacity to empathically attune to children and their needs while maintaining one’s professional leadership. In the training modules, the educators are supported to work on their challenges in relation to particular students and parents and in findings ways to improve these.

Our qualitative research analyzes the educators’ reflections on about “moments of relational change” and their experiences of co-creating shifts into more empathic and generative social fields, during the EMS project implementation.the discussion of the findings, we take a social fields perspective, which considers the lived experience of the actors at school of both shaping their relationships and being affected by them, as well as the way the relations are co-embedded in larger structures.

As outlined in a previous publication (Herrmann, Nielsen & Aguilar Raab, 2021) the pandemic has affected the social aspect of school life in all involved schools, confronting the educators with uncertainty, stress, and different crisis-induced social dynamics within the school community. Hence, the situation has even more highlighted the necessity of building positive relationships throughout the school community.

Research question

• In what ways do the educators (teachers, pedagogues and leaders) reflect on moments of change in their relationships and in the school’s and classroom’s atmospheres during the process of the EMS training and implementation?
• What characterizes the educators‘ lived experience of a shift into a more generative social field?
• How do the educators reflect on the conditions (inner, inter, and outer) for such shifts and their outcomes?
• How do the students (4^th to 6^th graders) evaluate their relationships with each other, in their class?
• Along the process, does the level of distress change in students (4^th -6^th graders) – which could be accounted for well-being?

The research design is a longitudinal and convergent mixed-methods design (Creswell and Clark, 2017) obtaining data from both quantitative and qualitative sources. At the quantitative level, validated questionnaires are used at both the school staff and student levels. Here, we will focus exclusively on the student level. Fourth to sixth-graders are being surveyed once at the beginning and once at the end of the respective school year on topics of relational classroom climate and relational competencies, for example, how they communicate, whether they can empathize with others, and more. In addition, we focus on stress and well-being. For the evaluation we use common statistical programs - SPSS and R - and rely in these preliminary analyses on comparisons of means and analyses of variance. Qualitative interviews were carried out before and throughout the implementation process of the EMS project. Repeated Interviews with school leaders were carried out in three rounds. The first round of interviews was in early 2019, before the first training modules and before the pandemic. The second round of interviews followed in the period of reopening after lockdown in summer 2020. These interviews followed up on insights regarding relationships at the schools from the pre-interviews before the pandemic. The third round of interviews were carried out in fall 2021, when the first training cohort was completing the training modules. The post-training interviews with educators were carried out in fall 2021, after completion of at least 5 of the 6 training modules. For each round of the semi-structured interview a specific interview guide was developed. The data was analyzed using thematic analysis. We opted for inductive reflexive thematic analysis to dissect our data (Braun and Clarke, 2006). The analysis process started with familiarizing with the data by carrying out active and repeated readings of the interview texts. During the reading phase we focused on the research questions and our conceptualization of social fields, but remained open to previously unreported, newly discoverable phenomena. The interview texts were coded, codes collated, and translated into themes. Themes were further developed in a recursive process. Team meetings were carried out to check theme coherence and their match to data extracts. Finally, themes were defined, specifically denoting each theme and its interrelation with other themes. In an additional step, patterns of interaction between the actors and corresponding descriptions of affective atmospheres were identified within the interview text and represented using causal interaction loops.

The presentation will discuss the qualitative data together with the first results from analyzing the quantitative data on the student level in spring 2022. The following paragraph summarizes some important preliminary qualitative findings – which will be presented and outlined in greater detail. The themes accentuate how the moments of relational change identified by the educators concern students, colleagues etc. – but they prominently also concern the educators’ awareness of their own emotions and a growing capacity for self-compassion and emotion regulation. The themes illustrate changes during the EMS training and implementation for instance in terms of an enhanced capacity to deal with frustration and intense emotions, as well as having greater acceptance for own emotions along with an increased capacity for self-care and setting of healthy boundaries. What is more, also brief practices of relational mindfulness are mentioned as effective tools for improving teacher-student relationships and classroom climate during everyday life at school. Furthermore, central themes in the data concerned moments of change in the educators’ relations to students. Here, the educators illustrate the impact of seemingly subtle shifts in their affective attunement to children, as well as educator’s coherent self-expression which help establish a personal sense of connectedness to individual students. In relation to parents, the educators emphasize the positive impact of listening openly, which requires from the educators an awareness and suspension of habitual and preconceived judgements towards parents. The educators’ reflections on the conditions for improving classroom climate and teacher-student relationships emphasize that the regular school system’s structures inhibit the cultivation and enaction of more generative social fields. Here, the EMS project is portrayed as a “necessary earthquake”, which catalyzes a sharp awareness of the tension between an aspired version of school and the overall system’s current shortcomings.

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