Caterina Mamprin: A career driven by a passion for education

From the day she entered the undergraduate program in psychology at Université de Montréal, Caterina Mamprin was captivated by what she was being taught.

“At the end of every class, I'd call my mother to tell her all about what I'd learned,” she recalled. “I was amazed by how much is known about humans and all the little insights that can help us understand our everyday behaviour.”

Now appointed an assistant professor in UdeM's Faculty of Education, Maprin specializes in research that focuses on understanding and supporting teachers.

But back then, as a student, she felt her studies were too theoretical and too removed from practical realities. When someone told her about special education, her perception changed.

“I thought, that’s exactly what I want to do!” Mamprin recalled. She went on to do a preparatory year in special education, followed by a master’s in orthopedagogy.

“During my prep year, I met students who were passionate about education, who had stars in their eyes talking about it,” she said. “But when I was doing my master’s, I realized how difficult it is. Many teachers were struggling to find ways to manage their classes and help each student reach their full potential.”

A catalyst to a Ph.D.

In one of her classes, she read a paper on teachers' well-being in the workplace – and that proved to be the catalyst that ultimately led her to pursue a doctorate on the topic.

For her Ph.D. research in education at UdeM, Mamprin focused on the social support that teachers provide each other by getting together and talking.

“I sat down with teachers and talked about what they were experiencing,” she recalled. “That was it. No instructions, no opening questions beyond ‘How are you?’ We just started talking. The group became a safe place to discuss, based on confidentiality and mutual respect.”

For Mamprin, the experience revealed how important it is for teachers to share experiences in a group setting and to give each other direct and also indirect support.

“We often define support as ‘you ask me for help and I give you help,’” she pointed out. “But there is also indirect help, when someone shares information that resonates with the listener’s situation. And that kind of help is very valuable.”

Moving to Moncton

After earning her doctorate, Mamprin continued her research as a professor at Université de Moncton, collaborating with the Association des enseignantes et des enseignants francophones du Nouveau-Brunswick to produce a snapshot of teachers after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study found a high incidence of burnout symptoms and declining indices of professional well-being among the teachers' association members, even after the pandemic had ended.

These results led Mamprin to explore how teachers could be better supported in ways suited to the complexities of their circumstances. How, she wondered, to help teachers who are already exhausted and perceive seeking aid as a burden?

Mamprin launched two studies to explore these issues in greater depth. The first focused on peer support among teachers in Nw Brunswick and the phenomenon of emotional contagion.

“Burnout symptoms can ‘spread’ through co-rumination,” she explained. “For example, teachers expressing their fatigue in the staff room can feed negative feelings in other teachers.”

Mamprin’s study identified factors that could amplify this process, such as problems in their immediate environment and in the teachers' own mental states.

The second study, still ongoing, examines the support provided to teachers by different levels of the school system, from teachers themselves right up to New Brunswick's Department of Education. The goal is to identify useful resources that do not add to the burden of already overwhelmed teachers.

The study also involves identifying specific teacher profiles based on daily burnout symptoms and how teachers respond to different types of support. The data are currently being collected and analyzed.

At the same time, Mamprin has been working with teacher wellness counsellors.

“I helped them understand the most critical situations in order to guide their work with teachers,” she said. Mamprin also produced fact sheets to document the situation in New Brunswick and suggest courses of action.

Understanding trauma in refugee kids

Alongside her work on teacher well-being, Mamprin participated in research on refugee families.

Her doctoral supervisor at UdeM, Garine Papazian-Zohrabian, a professor in the education faculty's Department of Psychopedagogy and Andragogy in the Faculty of Education, involved her in studies of grief and trauma in refugee children, particularly those fleeing the Syrian crisis that began in 2011.

She helped create a MOOC on psychosocial/educational realities and intervention strategies for refugees and asylum seekers and coordinated an UdeM-based interdisciplinary research team on refugee and asylum-seeking families known by its French-language acronym ERIFARDA.

Mamprin also accompanied Papazian-Zohrabian and her team on a research trip to Lebanon to gather information on the migratory journey of refugees. They observed living conditions in refugee camps and how children are getting an education in those difficult circumstances.

“Students took turns going to school: the Lebanese children went in the morning and Syrian children in the afternoon,” she noted. “And this was often against a backdrop of underlying conflict.”

Back in Montreal, Mamprin worked with teachers of classes for newcomers to help them understand their students. “We discovered that teachers don’t always know what the children have been through,” she said. “So we worked with teachers to help them ask the right questions and become more aware of the complex realities.”

Mamprin is continuing her research on how to enhance the student-teacher relationship, insisting on the crucial importance of this connection for learning.

“I want to find the optimal conditions that enable teachers and students to truly connect and be available for an educational relationship,” she said. “When a person is stressed or exhausted, the relationship suffers. They become less sensitive to the other person’s situation, and this is true for both the adult and the child.”

Dedicated to teaching

In addition to being a seasoned researcher, Mamprin is a dedicated teacher.

“When I decided I wanted to teach, I looked back at my life and realized I’d been doing it since I was 16!" she said. "I’ve been a camp counsellor, a ski instructor, a telemark instructor. So I’ve always liked being in an educational relationship."

Mamprin’s first teaching experience was as a lecturer at UdeM – and it was a revelation.

"Even though I had 70 students, the class had a great dynamic, she recalled. "I really enjoyed getting to know my students and seeing how the group worked." Her subsequent experience as an assistant professor in Moncton confirmed that.

Now Mamprin has started teaching courses at UdeM on mental health in schools and on child development – and hopes to continue inspiring and supporting future teachers while pursuing research of her own.