Perception of students’ smell by primary school teachers

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on the perception of students’ smell by primary school teachers.

In the first part, I present the importance of smell in general and the importance of smell from the point of view of an integrated personality, based on an overview of the literature and a comparison between several authors. In the second part, I use qualitative analysis to present the findings of a research among 54 primary school teachers. In the research, I was primarily interested in the teachers’ perception of students’ smell, the influence of students’ smell on the teachers’ well-being and the course of action when they notice an unpleasant smell in the student.

The results show that for most of the teachers asked, the students’ smell is important and they notice it; that they feel uncomfortable with the unpleasant smell of students; that they rarely try to solve problems with the unpleasant smell of students on a deeper level (e.g. in their family). Most of the teachers asked believe that the unpleasant smell of students does not affect the educational process and the relationship between teacher and student.