meet-up on relational competences May 21.st

13:00-18:00  May 21st 2025 international working seminar for educational professionals, in Latvia University Nature House, Riga, Latvia. Participation is free, registration obligatory here, if you plan to attend on-site or zoom. The lecture parts will be in English and will be streamed live on FB Familylab Latvia and zoom.

The event is organized by the Latvia University Mentorship Program in collaboration with Familylab Latvia, partly financed by Familylab Association.

The workshop will feature international speakers from Slovenia, France, and Canada, coming together to inspire and highlight relational competence as a professional skill, essential to every educator's professional toolkit. In short – within the educational context, between teacher and student, there is a third, often overlooked element: relationship between them.

13:40  

Ivana Gradišnik

The Shared Journey:  Relationships, Authenticity and Leadership

14:50 

David Dutarte

Equal dignity – the key to relationships that make us grow

16:30 

Mylene Vezina

Authentic Teachers, Balanced Classrooms: Unlocking the Power of Relationship

17:00

Discussion panel

Participants: David Dutarte – France, Ivana Gradišnik- Slovenia, Mylene Vezina – Canada,  Ulrika Faerch - Denmark, Dušanka Kosanovic - Croatia.

Familylab lessons from past - dreams for the future

Strong Relationships - Strong Teaching: the Foundation of Professional Competence

13:40 The Shared Journey:  Relationships, Authenticity and Leadership

In every teacher-child interaction, there is a third, often overlooked element – the relationship itself.

As education moves away from authoritarian models toward more collaborative, respectful approaches, teachers are increasingly expected to master the art of relational competence.

This lecture introduces relational competence as a key part of professional teaching identity. It is not a technique, but a practical and ethical skill – the ability to respond authentically, take full responsibility for the quality of the relationship, and lead with a sense of inner authority grounded in relationship and self-awareness.

A craft to be discovered, developed, and cultivated – it blends personal integrity, authenticity, emotional awareness, and ethical responsibility.

Join us for a thought-provoking session on what it really means to lead with personal authority — not power — and to teach not only with knowledge, but also with human presence.

14:50 Equal Dignity –the Key to Relationships that Make Us Grow

Children and adults alike, we all aspire to be respected as individuals. In a world where we are facing a global crisis of authority on an unprecedented scale, the recurring debates on the subject remain sterile, revealing only a certain nostalgia for the « good old days » when education meant obedience and one-way respect. 

Have we missed the point? Today, the amount of knowledge about child development forces us, individually and collectively, to question our educational inconsistencies and our values, to change the way we look at children and to change the way we relate with them!

Mylene Vezina

Leader of Familylab Canada, teacher in  Université du Québec à Rimouski, performing doctoral study research of relational competences in educational environment, especially interaction between teacher and student.

16:30 Authentic Teachers, Balanced Classrooms: Unlocking the Power of Relationship

In a context where classroom management is perceived as one of the greatest challenges facing the teaching profession, recent research has placed the relationship between teachers and their students at the center of concern. 

At the secondary level, several factors make it difficult to develop authentic relationships, and few studies have focused on the resources mobilized by experienced teachers to develop quality relationships with their students. 

This presentation explores the relational competence of experienced secondary school teachers by uncovering the underlying, often unconscious, knowledge, intentions, beliefs, emotions, and values that are mobilized in practice during relational situations that are perceived as positive. 

The results describe how relational competence is experienced in terms of group management and individual intervention. The elements of an individual intervention to establish and develop a quality relationship with a student are described, allowing us to identify the meaning of relational competence as perceived by the five participants to the study. These elements are then related to the concepts of relational competence in educational settings as described by Jesper Juul and Helle Jensen.

17:00-18:00  Panel discussion:
                           Familylab Lessons from Past - Dreams for the Future

                           Strong Relationships - Strong Teaching: the Foundation of
                           Professional Competence

Experts (in alphabetical order):

Dušanka Kosanovič