How my Living Educational Theory Research is helping me to improve my practice as a primary school teacher, in supporting children to recognise and manage their anxiety

In this paper, I articulate my own living-educational-theory of my practice as a primary school teacher, who seeks to help her students to recognise and manage their anxiety in order to improve their quality of life and ability to benefit fully from their school experiences. Anxiety disorders are one of the top contributors to the global burden of disease for young people (Global Burden of Disease Study, 2019). I outline how I created an intervention to support four mixed gender, twelve-year-old children – with no anxiety diagnosis – to recognise and manage their anxiety with the involvement of their parents and class teachers. As my research developed, I realised that my principle educational values of social justice, empowerment, hope and positivity were not being lived fully in my practice. By explicitly addressing my living contradiction, I came to a deeper awareness of, and fluency in, my educational practice, and saw the children becoming less anxious and more confident over time. As a Living Educational Theory Researcher, I recognise the importance of rendering this text as relatable to the reader as possible and to provide an original contribution to educational knowledge and theorising.

Aislinn Kennedy University of Maynooth, Ireland

ORCID iD 0000-0003-4086-5247

CC BY-NC Copyright: © 2022 Kennedy. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Submitted 230621 Published 311222