An Interdisciplinary Human Development Approach to Wellbeing: Orientation and Dialogical Self-evaluation within School and Curricular Contexts.

Author(s):

Maeve O'Brien(presenting / submitting)Andrew O'Shea(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper (Copy for Joint Session)

Session Information

14 SES 07 C JS, Conceptual and Empirical Perspectives on Student Wellbeing

Joint Paper Session NW 08 and NW 14

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

K3.24

Chair:

Ros McLellan

Contribution

Context and topic/problem

This paper explores the problem of wellbeing and the possibilities of fostering wellbeing in schools today against the backdrop of intense uncertainty in the political economic and cultural spheres of life. Our understandings and perspectives on wellbeing informed by scholarship and current research must take serious account of the particular local circumstances inorder to foster real wellbeing (Sen 1995).

However, wellbeing as it appears in recent international education literature is often seen as a normative practice; it offers a prescriptive solution to living well and as such can appear eminently teachable and unproblematic. As the more critical scholarship and research on wellbeing bears out, the prescriptive approach is an over simplification of the terrain of wellbeing and the challenges associated with adopting and fostering wellbeing within contemporary schooling. In the context of such constant change and reform in education (which often means operationalising new magic bullets in the curricula), we seek to challenge the orthodoxy of ongoing reform and new solutions to problems of wellbeing or illbeing. We propose a more robust developmental approach to the issue of human wellbeing, and how it can be supported in schools which builds on our previous work on a wellbeing wholistic curriculum and approach to schooling (OBrien 2008 and O Shea 2011).

Aims

Since the very interchangeability of ‘wellbeing’ today with terms such as flourishing, resilience, self-efficacy, mental health, health among others, creates challenges and confusions for teachers and students, our research seeks to gain some conceptual clarity in relation to types of wellbeing models, their focus and their disciplinary/world view limits. And secondly, in gaining some clarity around the meanings of wellbeing and illbeing, it explores how we can orient ourselves in a space of wellbeing concern as teachers with our students.

Conceptual Framework

In approaching both the question of conceptual tensions on the meanings of wellbeing, and also how to orient oneself in the space of wellbeing we address questions of competing values.

Sen faced this problem in developing the influential Human Capabilities and Human Development approach to wellbeing, but recognised that values and individual valuing of particular forms of self-realisation were inescapable challenges in developing a model of flourishing. In the field of education, Richard Pring directly confronts this issue of value differences and wellbeing in his introduction to The International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing (2010). He contends that differences in values are indicative of significant differences in understandings around what it is to be fully human, of human flourishing and of wellbeing. Pring advises that education and curricula that seek to support student wellbeing cannot easily dismiss the kinds of tensions that are inherent across different value systems and how they are expressed in particular approaches to wellbeing.

Our conceptual approach to the research draws on internationally significant disciplinary models of wellbeing and considers their contributions to the field of education while critiquing the values and world views which inform them (eg Allardt 1993 welfare approach, Sen 1995 capabilities , Seligman 2011 PERMA positive psychology, and broadly humanistic approaches). The second part of the research which considers questions of meaning making and illbeing is informed by the work of Charles Taylor in relation to an ethics of concern, and by Noddings on an ethics of care. These enable us to avoid falling into the trap of focusing only on the individual to the exclusion of the collective, and assists in gaining a depth-relational perspective of the problem of wellbeing for each person, one that is often neglected in welfare/social approaches.“ It explores the nexus where the social world meets the subjective world.

Method

This is a conceptual and desk based research which draws on the wealth of scholarship and empirically based research in the broad field of wellbeing and education.We adopt a hermeneutic and phenomenological approach to our analysis of theory and findings from research across the growing disciplinary and interdisciplinary field of wellbeing. Thus, tackling the issue of varying perspectives on wellbeing, means confronting the problem that there are competing views, each with its own account of the normative issues around human happiness and flourishing, and moreover its own account of human reality. In our research, we explore tensions and similarities between carefully chosen major exemplars of wellbeing approaches; models of wellbeing that attempt to reach across the social scientific disciplines of sociology and psychology and that try to combine subjective and objective dimensions of wellbeing within a more comprehensive and wholistic framework. Furthermore, then balancing social scientific perspectives (psychological and sociological) on wellbeing with philosophical enquiry into wellbeing, provides a rich and deeper way of thinking about big questions of meaning and satisfaction, and hopefully avoids what Pring (2010) has called clichés in relation to human flourishing and wellbeing. Philosophy has a rich and ancient tradition of scholarship in relation to ideas about a good life, selfhood and identity, the relation between virtue and the good, and in articulating questions which lie at the heart of ethical education and the issue of citizenship. These kinds of questions and forms of enquiry are important in the current educational context as educators grapple with big issues of normativity and value, and with their own personal understandings and experiences of satisfaction and happiness. Moreover, we draw upon philosophy as a discipline for thinking about wellbeing in terms of meaning, as it also enables us to think about illbeing as part of an explication of wellbeing as a developmental process. The significance of thinking about illbeing in relation to wellbeing is not to be underestimated in education, given emphases on individual achievement and pressures within the wider social context can lead to illbeing. Triangulating between these disciplinary areas we attempt to synthesize a Human Developmental ecological approach to wellbeing for schools.In awareness of the necessity for each individual to consider their own developmental journey in the terrain of wellbeing we develop an heuristic, a spatial metaphor to help place oneself on the wellbeing map and to orient in the complex space of wellbeing.

Expected Outcomes

The outcome of our research and the interdisciplinary analysis we bring to bear on the current wellbeing field has real possibilities for policy and for practice in education. Moreover, exploring wellbeing in the context of illbeing within a developmental framework can offer a way of evaluating oneself as a related situated self; of evaluating one's emotional and mental states in relation to a field of competing values that can threaten an individual's personal identity by trivialising their own meaning goals. We conclude that getting clear for oneself on one's own wellbeing goals, through a dialogical process of orientation in a space of concern,becomes all the more substantial for being clarified and articulated without excluding or necessarily downgrading the reality of illbeing. This is important as many positive interventions and magic bullet approaches to problems experienced by young people today may be more problematic than helpful in their development. Our research may shed light on what teaching and pedagogy look like if there was a more interdisciplinary, dialogical and wholistic approach to thinking about wellbeing, in the context of a space where each individual moves towards their own meaning goals within a broadly human development framework. We believe this work can allow for a situation whereby illbeing can sometimes have real value that may even challenge accepted wellbeing goals.In terms of health education this contribution explores wellbeing as the broadest conception of health education as an embodied, developmental and encompassing process that recognises an individual's own goals for their lives as well as taken account of more objective public and institutional considerations.

References

Allardt, E. (1993) Having, Loving, Being : An Alternative to the Swedish Model of Welfare Research. In Nussbaum and Sen (eds.), The Quality of Life, 88-94. Anderson, A. and Ronson, B. (2005) Democracy – The First Principle of Health Promoting Schools, The Electronic Journal of Health Education, 8, 24-35. http://www.iejhe.org. Aristotle (1976) Ethics. translated by J.A.K. Thompson. London: Penguin. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. Readings on the development of children, 2, 37-43. Cohen, J. (2006) Social, Emotional, Ethical and Academic Education: Creating a Climate for Learning, Participation in the Democracy and Wellbeing, Harvard Educational Review, 76, 2, 201-237. Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The dangerous rise of therapeutic education. London: Routledge. Flay, J. (1994) Can Children Do Moral Philosophy? In Growing Up with Philosophy, eds. Matthew Lipman and Margaret Sharp. Dubeque: Kandel Hunt. Furedi, F. (2004) Therapy Culture. London: Routledge. Konu, A., and Rimpelä, M. (2002) Well-being in schools: a conceptual model. Health promotion international, 17(1), 79-87. Layard, R. (2005) Happiness-Lessons from a New Science. New York, Penguin Press. Mac Allister, J. (forthcoming 2017) ‘The teacher perspective: A community approach to wellbeing in schools’ in Malcolm Thornburn (ed.) Wellbeing and Contemporary Schooling. London: Routledge. Noddings, N. (2012) The Caring relation in Teaching, Oxford Review of Education, 38, 6, 771-781. O’Brien, M. (2008) Wellbeing and Post-Primary Schooling: A review of the Literature. Dublin: NCCA. O’Shea, A. (2013) Educating for wholeness in an age of global citizenship: Staying with the problem of value, Irish Educational Studies, 32, 3, 275-289. Pring, R. (2010) Introduction in Lovatt, T., Twomey, R. and Clement, N. eds. International research Handbook on Values education and Student Wellbeing. London: Springer. Seligman,M. (2011) Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing. London: Nicholas Breasley. Sen, A. (1995) Inequality Reexamined. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, C. (1994) Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNICEF (2007) Child Wellbeing in Rich Countries: An Overview. Florence: UNICEF. Watson, D., Emery, C. and Bayliss, P. (2012) Children’s Social and Emotional Wellbeing in Schools. Bristol: Policy Press. Wright, J. and Burrows, L. (2004) ‘Being Healthy’: The Discursive Construction of Health in New Zealand Children’s responses to the National Education Monitoring Project. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 25, 2, 211-230.

Author Information

Maeve O'Brien (presenting / submitting)

Dublin City University, Ireland

Andrew O'Shea (presenting)