In recent years, well-being has become a central reference within educational discourse, particularly in relation to higher education (Fang, Ren, & Sotardi, 2025). This growing prominence does not arise in isolation. It is embedded in a broader post-postmodern condition in which universities are increasingly shaped by acceleration, performative accountability, and competitive logics that profoundly influence how educational experience is lived and interpreted (Donovan, 2013; Rosa, 2019; Biesta, 2021). Within these configurations, academic pathways are frequently reorganised around standardised trajectories and grammars of success, privileging visibility and efficiency over continuity and meaning (Barnett, 2011; Marginson, 2011).
As a consequence, the connection between learning and life orientation becomes increasingly fragile. Students’ experience risks fragmentation, unfolding as a form of shared yet solitary participation in which formal belonging coexists with feelings of disconnection, isolation, and difficulty in being recognised (Barrera Rosales & Marroccoli, 2019).
Within this context, well-being assumes a paradoxical position. It circulates as a promise of care and attentiveness, allowing aspects of student life marginalised to enter institutional discourse. At the same time, it is frequently absorbed into managerial dispositifs that render its enunciation visible without necessarily transforming the pedagogical conditions of formation (Davies, 2015; Volstad et al., 2020; Vohra & Misra, 2025).
It is from within this unresolved configuration that human flourishing comes into view as a pedagogical necessity. The turn to flourishing does not simply broaden the language of well-being; it sharpens the educational question by shifting attention to how educational experience is held together across time—how learning, relationships, and aspirations are enabled to enter into continuity rather than remaining episodic, contingent, or easily disrupted. Understood as a form of sustainable well-being, flourishing names a process through which human development unfolds within lived trajectories, remaining attentive to equity, social justice, and the shared enhancement of educational environments (de Ruyter, 2004; Duraiappah et al., 2022; Lomas et al., 2025).
This pedagogical posture echoes broader international debates on the future of education. UNESCO’s recent work positions flourishing as a normative compass capable of linking present experience with desirable scenarios, without prescribing a uniform vision of the good life across contexts (UNESCO, 2021, 2025).
In this re-orientation, self-narratives come into view as a crucial site for inquiring into flourishing. Drawing on Nussbaum’s (2008) notion of narrative imagination as an ethical capability, self-narration enables individuals to recognise their own lives as already entangled with wider horizons of meaning and possibility. Thus, what is often framed as a private condition becomes, through the mediating role of narration, a matter of collective responsibility (Bruner, 1990; Demetrio, 2012).
If universities can be approached as narrative ecosystems, they are also spaces in which narratives may be reworked, expanded, and held in common. As Salemans and Budding (2022) argue, sharing personal narratives constitutes a powerful way of articulating the public value of higher education—one that foregrounds contribution, relational impact, and long-term significance rather than short-term optimisation.
From this positioning, the research explores how opportunities for human flourishing are recognised and narrated by students within university life, which aspirations for flourishing they express, and how self-narration may sustain their possible realisation in higher education. Attending to students’ stories as both individual and collective expressions, the study also traces which shared dimensions of flourishing emerge across narrative accounts.
These questions guide an inquiry that aims to understand flourishing as a lived and relational educational process, culminating in the co-construction of WONDER (Ways Of Narrating Desirable Educational Routes)—collective narrative manifestos through which students’ voices are returned to the university as a call for responsibility, imagination, and educational renewal.

A qualitative-driven convergent design (Morse & Niehaus, 2009), situated within an interpretivist paradigm (Guba & Lincoln, 1994), frames the methodological architecture of this work. This choice reflects the assumption that human flourishing in higher education cannot be apprehended through a single epistemic lens, but requires attention to how experiences, aspirations, and meanings are narrated and held in relation. This stance is grounded in the integration of Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005). Narrative Inquiry enables close engagement with lived experience, approaching stories as situated and relational forms of knowing, while Appreciative Inquiry introduces a generative orientation toward possibilities, aspirations, and shared futures. Held together, these approaches sustain a methodological positioning in which understanding and transformation remain in productive tension. The research was conducted at the University of Padua between 2023 and 2025 and involved students enrolled in two master’s degree programmes. Participation was voluntary and varied across phases; engagement is therefore understood as phase-specific rather than cumulative. The inquiry unfolded through the four phases, or 4D’s cycle, of Appreciative Inquiry. Discovery mapped students’ lived experiences and languages of well-being, flourishing, and self-narration through an exploratory semi-structured questionnaire. Dream shifted the focus from description to imagination, inviting students—via an asynchronous online forum—to articulate metaphors and visions of a flourishing university. Design took shape through WONDER (Ways Of Narrating Desirable Educational Routes), a narrative–pedagogical pathway oriented toward the co-construction of collective Flourishing Manifestos through shared storytelling and creative practices. Finally, Destiny involved a small group of volunteer students in a reflective re-reading and connective interpretation of these materials, culminating in a Manifesto for the Future conceived as a dialogic act of restitution addressed to the wider university community. Data analysis unfolded through differentiated yet interconnected procedures. Closed questionnaire items were examined using descriptive and inferential analyses, while open-ended responses were interpreted through Structured Tabular Thematic Analysis (Robinson, 2022). Narrative contributions were explored through Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021), supported by ATLAS.ti, alongside integrated visual–textual readings of creative artefacts. Throughout the analytic process, convergences, complementarities, and divergences were treated not as inconsistencies to be resolved, but as analytically meaningful differences. In line with a postdigital and post-human sensibility (Barad, 2007; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013), narratives, creative artefacts, and questionnaire responses were read as entangled material–discursive practices through which meanings of flourishing emerged in and through their interrelations.

The findings invite a reconceptualization of well-being within higher education by situating it in a broader ecology of flourishing. Rather than discarding well-being as a relevant construct, the study shows how students live it as inseparable from relational, spatial, temporal, and institutional conditions. A central empirical result concerns relational recognition as the condition through which well-being becomes inhabitable and flourishing conceivable. Across narratives, creative artefacts, and survey patterns, experiences of safety, being listened to, appreciation beyond merit, and opportunities for contribution consistently converge. Together, these elements form a recognitive configuration that mediates between institutional arrangements and lived experience, shaping whether students can remain present, participate meaningfully, and sustain engagement over time (Edmondson, 1999; Cook-Sather, 2020; Biesta, 2021). Students’ accounts further indicate that flourishing is cultivated through ordinary educational infrastructures: spaces that allow lingering rather than constant passage, and temporal rhythms that protect dialogue and reflection, sustaining continuity of meaning (Mallan, 2019; Lee et al., 2020; Lomas et al., 2025). Students’ aspirations consolidate this ecological picture. What is imagined as desirable consistently mirrors what has already been experienced as enabling, though fragile: supportive relationships, accessible spaces, protected time, and opportunities for participation. Aspirations thus function as evaluative orientations through which students identify what deserves to endure, be stabilised, and become more equitable within university life (Gale & Parker, 2015; Hart, 2016). Narration emerges as a pivotal practice through which these aspirations become intelligible and collectively negotiable. Through self- and collective narration, experience is rendered open to re-imagination, enabling forms of co-agency and shared responsibility (Bruner, 1990; Nussbaum, 2011; Foote, 2015). Within this frame, WONDER is proposed as a transferable methodological contribution for international research in higher education, providing a generative point of reference for comparative and context-sensitive inquiries into flourishing across diverse university systems.

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