Adding color to conflict: disruptive students' drawings of themselves with their teachers

Building on work examining teachers’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship, this study investigated how young students draw themselves with their teachers. Fourteen kindergarten and first-grade teachers each nominated 2 disruptive and 2 well-behaved students. Students then completed 1 drawing of themselves with their classroom teacher and 1 with a support teacher (e.g., librarian, art teacher) at 2 time points: the end of the school year (Phase 1) and the beginning of the next year (Phase 2). In coding for 8 markers of relationship quality—vitality/creativity, pride/happiness, vulnerability, emotional distance, tension/anger, role reversal, bizarreness/dissociation, and global pathology—we found no differences in the way that disruptive and well behaved students depicted their own relationships with teachers. Gender and phase effects were identified, however, with boys depicting greater relational negativity than girls and all students portraying greater emotional distance at the beginning of the school year.