The objective of this workshop is to critically discuss the dominant conceptualisation of student wellbeing and its relevance at the community level in different socio-cultural contexts. There is no question that wellbeing is increasingly the focus of attention in the educational arena.  Over the past decades, research has revealed that educational achievement has been increasingly linked to student wellbeing (Gutman & Vorhaus, 2012). Furthermore, there is an increased awareness that the ways children experience education may impact greatly on their overall wellbeing (Winthrop & Kirk 2011). Not surprisingly therefore, school-based programmes aiming to improve the wellbeing of children and adolescents have been implemented in different areas across the globe. In this respect, the OECD has recently initiated a new global measurement regime in the domain of education, comparing not only academic achievement in the key school subjects (PISA), but also students’ wellbeing (OECD 2017; 2019). However, despite this welcome focus, there are still many questions to be answered around how best to conceptualise wellbeing.

There is no doubt that the meanings we attach to the emotional, social and psychological wellbeing of the children and young adults depend largely on a number of factors specific to the socio-cultural structure and organisation of our own society and community (Thin. 2010). In contrast measurement tools have been developed and deployed globally in comparative studies (Casas & Rees, 2015), which imply uniformity in the characterisation of wellbeing among children and young adults as well as in the overall population.  Community, place and culture are rarely part of their design, which points toward the illusion that wellbeing practices and discourses anchored in the Global North should be de facto seen as universal (Ferrero & Barletti 2016). Yet evidence is accumulating that wellbeing measurement tools developed in the Global North do not capture wellbeing adequately in other contexts (McLellan, 2019).  Having that in mind, how can we move forward to ensure policies aiming at improving the wellbeing of students are in line with the socio-cultural context of the targeted communities?

The epistemological positioning that informs wellbeing - related policies and interventions at the school level has remained largely Euro-American centric to this day and predominantly connected to the field of positive psychology, the discipline that has produced so far one of the most comprehensive universal models.  As researchers, we have at this point to take a step back to increase our awareness of the fact that hegemonic practices and principles reflecting the hierarchical system of knowledge production characteristic of the colonial period continue to prevail in Western thinking (Santos 2016). One of the consequences of that deeply rooted way of constructing the world is that those practices and principles are not flexible enough to address meaningfully the socio-cultural complexity of modern societies, wherever we are on the globe. For that reason, our priority should be to revisit the conceptual foundations of student wellbeing in order to evaluate if the definitions found in most studies truly reflect the complexity of what wellbeing may mean in different cultural contexts (McMillan 2019).  Taking a broader perspective, we should further question the dichotomy between universal knowledge and situated knowledge (or local knowledge) that is embedded in a large number of studies relating to health promotion and wellbeing and which primarily reflects a global political asymmetry (Meusberger et al 2016).

During this workshop we will critically reflect and discuss the knowledge production and dissemination relating to student wellbeing at the global level and unpack the strengths and limitations of universal indicators and measurement tools from a multidisciplinary perspective. We will specifically focus on the relevance of implicating the community in research as well as in policy design. To achieve this, we plan to discuss key points through a series of linked small group activities adapted according to the number of participants. The session will start with an overview foregrounding the issues to be raised. The key questions to be addressed through the session, are: 1) Is it possible to compare student wellbeing across cultures and geographies? How can wellbeing indicators reflect the large diversity of worldviews and cultural representations of the self? 2) How can we transcend the dominant epistemologies and still engage in international collaboration to develop school-based programmes which aim to improve the wellbeing of students? 3) What are the different forms of knowledge that should be engaged when thinking about policies which address student wellbeing? 4) How can research address the issues mentioned above with a view of layering rather than reducing complexity? Three activities are envisaged, the first of which will involve a critical examination of wellbeing measures deployed in international surveys. The second activity will encourage explicit recognition of hegemonic practices and principles reflecting the hierarchical system of knowledge production and include discussion of how to move beyond this in formulating policy and practice. The third activity will build on the outcomes from the first two activities and will entail a mind mapping exercise to identify the emergent issues for further investigation.

The first activity will enable the different constructions of wellbeing brought by attendees to be identified, helping attendees to acknowledge a range of perspectives. Mapping these to existing wellbeing measures will help to illustrate the limitations of such measures and facilitate a deeper understanding of differences in wellbeing perceptions relating to individual context and experience. Once these differences and contradictions have been highlighted, the second activity will engage attendees in deeper thinking about the nature of discourses around wellbeing. In acknowledging these discourses, through a process of bracketing, attendees will start to be able to reconsider whether international collaborations are possible, in what form and for what purpose in relation to policy and practice. The final activity aims to bring together learnings from these activities and look forward in terms of what new questions are of value to pursue. Overall, we expect the attendees will have developed or increased their awareness of the necessity to conceptualise wellbeing as embedded within community and setting. We anticipate that an argument for future emic or derived etic studies will be made.

Casas, F., & Rees, G. (2015). Measures of Children's Subjective Well-Being: Analysis of the Potential for Cross-National Comparisons Child Indicators Research, 8, 49-69. Ferrero , E.,Barletti J.P.S. (2016). Placing Wellbeing. Anthropological Perspectives on Wellbeing and Place. Anthropology in Action 23 (3), 1-5. Gutman, L. M. & Vorhaus, J. (2012). The Impact of Pupil Behaviour and Wellbeing on Educational Outcomes. London: DfE. McLellan, R. (2019). Enhancing wellbeing: The necessity and implications of a culturally-grounded interdisciplinary conceptualisation. The Psychology of Education Review, 43 (2), 37-47. Meusburger, P., Freytag, P., Suarsana, L. (2016). Ethnic and Cultural Dimensions of Knowledge and Education: An Introduction. In Meusbuge, P., Freytag, P., Suarsana, L. (eds) Ethnic and Cultural Dimension of Knowledge. London: Springer, pp. 1-22. OECD (2017). PISA 2015 Results (Volume III): Students' Well-Being. Paris: OECD Publishing. OECD (2019). PISA 2018 Well-being Framework, in PISA 2018 Assessment and Analytical Framework. Paris: OECD Publishing. Santos, B.de S. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. London: Routledge. Thin, N. (2010) Why Anthropology Can Ill Afford to Ignore Well-Being in Mathews, G. and Izquierdo, C. (eds) Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 23-44. Winthrop, R,M. and Kirk, J. ( 2011) Learning for a Bright Future: Schooling, Armed Conflict, and Children’s Well-Being. In Mundy, K., and Dryden-Peterson, S. (eds) Education Children in Conflict Zones. New York;Teachers College Press, pp. 101-122.