DoctorVeronica O'Toole

My primary research interests are emotions, emotional intelligence (EI), emotion regulation and social emotional wellbeing of students and teachers, including during and post disaster. Recent research projects include “The Student Agency Project” led through Washington State University, “The Impact of Covid 19 on Principal and Teacher Wellbeing” led through Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland, and the Teaching & Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project entitled, “Co-constructing a culturally and linguistically sustaining, Te Tiriti -based Ako framework for socio-emotional wellbeing in education”. I am also involved in other research projects investigating students’ emotions in higher education, in New Zealand and Ireland, having been a visiting scholar at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2019. Previous research includes investigating the emotional impacts of the Christchurch February 2011 earthquake on Christchurch teachers, funded by the University of Canterbury Digital Archive (CEISMIC), an investigation into emotions in tertiary teaching, funded by AKO Aotearoa and a Marsden-funded PhD scholarship investigating the role of emotion in children’s classroom learning as a co-researcher in the Project on Learning (1999 - 2002), led by the late Professor Graham Nuthall. In 2006, I was the Inaugural Recipient of the Sutton-Smith Doctoral Award for excellence in a PhD in Eductation. In 2011, I received the Fulbright-Cognition Scholarship in Educational Research Award which enabled me to spend six weeks at the Health Education and Behavior (HEB) Lab at Yale University, where key EI research programmes have been developed, and six weeks as Visiting Scholar to the Department of Educational Leadership at Wichita State University, Kansas.