Emotions and conflicts in teaching: how a training course for elementary school teachers can impact their conceptions about conflict in the classroom.
The practice of conflict resolution methods in schools has been studied for the last few decades, but there is no consensus on what would be the best way to resolve them, nor is there agreement on the meaning of conflict in this context. Amid a landscape lacking in scientific and methodological rigor, various studies have emerged proposing solutions to resolve such conflictual situations, but these studies still lack rigorous methodology to determine the effectiveness of the resolution methods. Inspired by Vygotsky's concepts of psychological development, we developed a teacher training course that was implemented in two groups of basic education teachers—the first at the national level and the second for teachers in the city of Juiz de Fora/MG. The aim of this work is to investigate whether this training course impacted how teachers perceive the concept of conflict. We used the Forma Mentis Network method to measure how teachers perceived the concept of conflict in the school environment before and after the course. During its implementation, participant statements were collected. The quantitative data suggests that it is possible to infer that, after participating in the course, an individual is 2.15 times more likely to attribute a neutral valence to the word "conflict" than before. The qualitative analysis indicated a shift in how conflicts are perceived, suggesting that this training course has the potential to change teachers' perceptions in relation to the concept of conflict, indicating that conflicts can be seen as allies in the psychological development of the subjects involved.