Professional interaction between psychologists and teachers in child education

Abstract

Interaction between psychologists and teachers is essential due to variability of social and cultural conditions of psychological and pedagogical support in education and upbringing as well as the need to combine professional efforts to solve the issues related to providing psychological and pedagogical support to children. ‘Interaction’ implies a subject-to-subject system of relationships between the participants, in contrast to ‘impact’. Within the activity approach, interaction between a teacher and a psychologist implies presence of joint actions, their conscious subjective activity, contributing to the change of the educational environment, its transition to a new qualitative level, a change of positions and actions of participants, and their perception of the subject of interaction. The article presents a theoretical analysis of the content and applied aspects of ‘professional interaction between psychologists and teachers’ in training, development and education of children. We discuss the content and directions of productive interaction between psychologists and teachers aimed at a single task — creating conditions for preserving the normative mental and psychological development of the modern generation of children. The increasing responsibility for child education, development and upbringing that the society places on teachers and psychologists foregrounds the importance of understanding — first of all, by teachers and psychologists themselves — what kind of professional and personal cooperation between them can facilitate the set task. The main purpose of the discussion is to determine the directions of joint psychological and pedagogical support of children and the angle of professional interaction between teachers and psychologists, which is primarily defined as the process of joint activity of two active subjects in which they exchange not only professional actions and operations but also value and meaningful attitudes and positive emotional states, i.e., everything that can have a positive impact on the child’s inner world.