Session Information
99 ERC SES 04 L, Health and Wellbeing Education
Paper Session
Contribution
Nowadays, a dignified condition of social existence presupposes good navigation skills: surviving the elusive liquidity of contemporary times and spaces (Bauman, 2013) means learning to sway in the flow, that is to enjoy the experience in an optimal way, being absorbed and at the same time intact inside the intensity of that moment. What Csíkszentmihályi (2013) defines as a "state of grace".
The flowing movement takes on the nuances of a practice of freedom and, at the same time, of democratic liberation, since it allows the individual to experience an intrinsic involvement with life, attributing to it a personal choice and meaning. Consequently, faced with this condition, educational institutions are invested with a new, but eternal, political responsibility: educating for freedom, social justice, equity (Freire, 1994; Nussbaum, 1997, 2002). Education thus assumes the role of valorisation of personal agency, life aspirations and human potentials (ONU, 2006).
Within this context, however, resides a paradox: contemporary changes leads to ambitions for progress that are often unsustainable for the promotion of an adequate quality of life; a capitalistic individualization in which the citizen perceives him/herself only and in this solitude, oppressed because detached from any inter-personal belonging (Rosales, Frangioni & Marroccoli, 2019).
The same loneliness and lack of belonging complained by more and more university students, whose educational system seems to be frozen within a performative perspective of competence and academic success, far away from the generative perspective of individual capability and fulfillment (Volstad et al., 2020). Higher Education is asked to shift its gaze from welfare to well-being, to re-think educational processes capable of overcoming the freedom-solitude paradox, rediscovering how the apparent antinomies are actually accomplices constructs, equally significant for co-building a democratic reality. Then, how to deal with this urgent need?
One possibility has been suggested by Nussbaum (1997), according to whom a fundamental tool for the cultivation of society corresponds to "narrative imagination", that is, the ability to interpret one’s own history and empathize with that of others, imagining better life scenarios for each, for all.
According to this perspective, self-narratives are interpretative keys of personal aspirations on the ancient εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), in the sense of flourishing life (D'Olimpio, 2022), as well as a starting point for designing enabling and accessible contexts that suits everyone's functioning.
Considering this framework, our research aims to answer the following questions: which are the opportunities of flourishing currently offered by University, according to students’ self-narratives? Which are the ideal opportunities aspired by the students? Which common flourishing dimensions emerge from students’ narratives? And, in which ways can self-narratives support students’ personal flourishing within the University contexts?
Thus, through a combinated narrative-appreciative inquiry on students’ flourishing and the transcendent essence of their personal story as community core living (Huber, Caine, Huber and Steeves, 2013), students are welcomed in a democratic space of sharing ideas and ideals. Meanwhile, they participate in expressing a common culture of flourishing through meaningful connections among their own identity and others’ narratives (Wise & Barney, 2021).
Hence, my research purposes are: (re)discovering the flourishing perspective from undergraduate students’ voices and from their autobiographical narratives, questioning together with them the ways in which such narratives can prove to be a positive pedagogical-didactic support; inquiring students' well-being aspirations by enhancing practices of self-narration through appreciation; transforming students' narrative-appreciative journey into a common manifest of flourishing, in the form of an Open Educational Resource (OER) shareable with the representatives of the whole university students, in order to make this topic a more open and collective discussion, because living well in education regards any of us, as all of us.
Method
The assumption of personal narratives as interpretative keys of educational realities leads this research to embrace the methodology of Narrative Inquiry, which employs self-narratives as in-depth living data, means of understanding individuals’ perspectives (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). It requires going beyond the use of narrative as rhetorical structure to an analytic examination of the underlying insights of a personal story (Bell, 2002). Simultaneously, the purpose of seeking images of the possible, within the students’ storytelling, finds its place in the generative frame of Appreciative Inquiry, searching for life-giving forces through a 4-D cycle (Whitney & Cooperrider, 1998). It is precisely through the four phases of this cycle that our research project has been planning. The first phase, known as Discovery, is intended to inquire “what is”. For this reason, we have conducted a Systematic Literature Review, following the PRISMA Statement (Page et al., 2021), to explore the evolutionary concept of human flourishing, and its possible connections with self-narration, in the existing studies. Based on the qualitative results of this review, we have developed an exploratory questionnaire, concerning well-being and narration, that is going to be proposed to 340 undergraduate students from three different courses of Padua University. The participation is voluntary, respectfully with the freedom of expression. The questionnaire has been inspired by the Flourish Project (Ellyatt, 2022) and it includes both open and closed questions, in the view of a concurrent embedded strategy. The second phase, called Dream, aims at imagining “what might be” and is going to start with an online forum for each course, during which those key themes retrieved from statistical and thematic analysis of questionnaire, will be shared and discussed, opening the way to generative reflections. In the third phase, that is Design, a new design proposal will involve each group of students: WONDER, acronym of Ways of Narrating Enjoyable Didactic Routes. It represents a narrative journey, following the appreciative scheme, through students’ artifacts and stories about past, present and future experiences and opportunities of flourishing in education. Finally, the fourth phase, or Destiny, brings together the previous steps and it faces “what will be”; in this sense, a structured focus group (Biggeri, Di Masi & Bellacicco, 2019) is going to take place with all the students from the three courses, with the purpose of creating a common “flourishing manifesto” to share with students’ representatives, and make it an accessible resource to the whole community.
Expected Outcomes
According to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the flourishing process has a multidimensional and ecological nature composed by individual, contextual, temporal and dialectical aspects that need to be equally explored (Volstad et al., 2020). With a view of catching this complex portrait, this research invests the role of inquiring human flourishing within the life stories of students, looking for personal, as well as interpersonal, meanings of it. Currently, the state of process is focused on the analysis of students’ responses to the questionnaire, and soon we will start with the second phase of our inquiry path. Frequently questioning our research about the ways it can be significant for the whole community, we make practice of a metacognitive exercise that helps us to both stimulate utopian ideas of improvement and innovative thinking. Thus, this significance appears to live in a transformative process that embraces a pro-positive tension into the educational scenarios and, likewise, contextualizes in them concrete tools of collaborative and narrative reflections. In reference to this, the scientific society does not surely lack scales of well-being measurement, but the educational community complains of missing qualitative explorations and narrative reflections up on flourishing. Therefore, through the encounter of the methodologies and methods described above, the research is gradually embracing the perspective of Grassroot Innovation (Belda-Miquel, Pellicer-Sifres & Boni, 2020), by responding to students' priority of a bottom-up approach, their need of thinking themselves active “storytellers”, creators of narrative plots of learning, not more objects of a defined storyline, in which what counts is just performing. Flourishing and self-narratives are here re-discovered as key dimensions of individuals’ telos and autobiographical epistemologies, necessary foundations for a community building that open its arms to a connective WONDER, with the meaning of marvel but also asking.
References
Bauman, Z. (2013). Liquid modernity. NJ, Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. Belda-Miquel, S., Pellicer-Sifres, V., & Boni, A. (2020). Exploring the contribution of grassroots innovations to justice: Using the capability approach to normatively address bottom-up sustainable transitions practices. Sustainability, 12(9), 1-9. Bell, J. S. (2002). Narrative inquiry: More than just telling stories. TESOL quarterly, 36(2), 207-213. Biggeri, M., Di Masi, D., & Bellacicco, R. (2019). Disability and higher education: assessing students’ capabilities in two Italian universities using structured focus group discussions. Studies in higher education, 45(4), 909-924. Connelly, F. M. & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2-14. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Flow: The psychology of happiness. New York, NY: Random House. D'Olimpio, L. (2022). Aesthetica and eudaimonia: Education for flourishing must include the arts. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 56(2), 238-250. Ellyatt, W. (2022). Education for Human Flourishing—A New Conceptual Framework for Promoting Ecosystemic Wellbeing in Schools. Challenges, 13(2), 1-23. Freire, P. (1994). Pedagogy of Hope. New York, NY: Continuum. Huber, J., Caine, V., Huber, M., & Steeves, P. (2013). Narrative inquiry as pedagogy in education: The extraordinary potential of living, telling, retelling, and reliving stories of experience. Review of research in education, 37(1), 212-242. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2002). Capabilities and social justice. International Studies Review, 4(2), 123-135. Page, M.J., McKenzie, J.E., Bossuyt, P.M., Boutron, I., Hoffmann, T.C., Mulrow, C.D., et al. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. 372. Rosales, P. B., Frangioni, T., & Marroccoli, G. (2019). Introduzione: il paradosso di un’esperienza collettiva solitaria. Riflessioni sulla solitudine politica. Cambio, 9(17), 5-13. United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, December 13, 2006, https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/crpd/pages/conventionrightspersonswithdisabilities.aspx. Volstad, C., Hughes, J., Jakubec, S. L., Flessati, S., Jackson, L., & Martin-Misener, R. (2020). “You have to be okay with okay”: experiences of flourishing among university students transitioning directly from high school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 15(1), 1-14. Whitney, D., & Cooperrider, D. L. (1998). The appreciative inquiry summit: Overview and applications. Employment Relations Today, 25(2), 17-28. Wise, J. B., & Barney, K. (2021). A Personal Narrative Conveying Human Flourishing. Therapeutic Recreation Journal, 55(1), 42-59.
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