Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling

Malcolm Thorburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317211402
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling examines the role of wellbeing in schools and argues that it should be integral to core policy objectives in health and education. The whole school focus chosen is conducive to the review of wellbeing in schools, and assists in better understanding the complex relationships between learners and teachers in policy contexts, where every teacher has a responsibility for learners' wellbeing.

By exploring a range of debates about the nature of wellbeing, the book shows how a child's wellbeing is inseparable from their overall capacity to learn and achieve, and to become confident, self-assured and active citizens. Drawing on international curriculum developments, it considers the ways in which wellbeing could reshape educational aims in areas such as outdoor learning and aesthetic imagination, helping to inform programmes of professional learning for teachers.

Separated into six parts, the book covers:

• philosophical perspectives on wellbeing
• policy perspectives on wellbeing
• professional perspectives on wellbeing
• practice perspectives on wellbeing
• future prospects for wellbeing
• a personal perspective on wellbeing.

Examining ways in which wellbeing can become a central component of the ethos, culture and environment of contemporary schools, Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling is an invaluable guide for all students, teachers, researchers and policy makers with an interest in learning, teaching and children's wellbeing.

PART I

Philosophical perspectives on wellbeing

1

WELLBEING, BEING WELL OR WELL BECOMING

Who or what is it for and how might we get there?

Claire Cassidy

Introduction

A book called Wellbeing, Education and Contemporary Schooling would not have been likely until relatively recently. Indeed, it has only been in the last fifteen to twenty years that the notions of wellbeing and schooling have been in any way aligned. Education policy makers around the world seem to have determined that wellbeing should be a central part of learning and life in schools; see, for example, the Scottish, Australian, Canadian, Japanese and Finnish curricula. Traditionally, schools focused on subject knowledge, what children might need to know or be able to do in order to function in the world of work. Take, for example, the teacher Gradgrind from Dickens’ Hard Times; he wants his pupils to learn facts and only facts, with no allowance for imagination or creativity, and certainly has no great interest in the children’s welfare. While this character is somewhat exaggerated, it is based on common features of schooling in the nineteenth, and even into the twentieth, century in Great Britain and beyond. If the likes of imagination, creativity and thinking were not encouraged in the classroom, then there is little to suggest that children’s wellbeing would have been of interest. It makes sense to wonder why there has been this shift.

Certainly, the global political context is an important one. In this age of instant access to world news and information, we are able to see and hear about the lives of our fellow humans, we are able to compare and contrast experiences, but this is not perhaps the main reason there has been a shift in thinking about what happens in schools. Biesta (2009) talks about the need to rethink the purpose of schooling. He situates his discussion in the educational context of outcomes and measurement agendas, suggesting that some thought needs to be given to what is valued in education. Note, too, that he is referring to the notion of education as opposed to schooling, with education perhaps being a broader notion than what happens in schools. Biesta cites the likes of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMMS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) as tools that are used to measure elements of children’s academic performance that result in the production of league tables where countries can compete against one another. The results of the studies are further dissected in order that individual countries can use these to ‘drive up standards’. While Biesta acknowledges that what happens in education should be based on facts, he cautions that we also need to consider what we want from our education systems and asserts that values have a part to play in determining curricula and learning. This leads to questions, therefore, of what education is for.

Given that wellbeing features so strongly in school curricula, especially in the likes of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence where wellbeing is the ‘responsibility of all’ teachers and, like literacy and numeracy, is a central plank of what is done in schools, it seems that there has been a move in the purpose of schooling. While the language of measurement and outcomes is ever present in educational discourse, this is not restricted to academic subject areas like science, maths and literacy. Indicators of wellbeing have been produced, and measures are in place to gauge children’s wellbeing. In Scotland, Scottish Government policy dictates that every child’s wellbeing should be considered against them being safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible and included (http://www.gov.scot/Topics/People/Young-People/gettingitright/background/wellbeing). While the need to determine the purpose of education is important, the question of why wellbeing has become more prominent in school curricula remains. It is to this that the remainder of the chapter will turn.

In 1989 the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) was published, and then subsequently ratified by world governments (with the exception to date of the USA). The treaty asserted fifty-four articles designed to protect and advance children’s social, political, civil, cultural and economic rights. Taken together, as the Convention states that the rights are not discrete, the wellbeing of children is at the very core. The need for this specific attention to children draws awareness to why there is a contemporary interest in children’s wellbeing. Around the time of the UNCRC, a new academic discipline was emerging, that of Childhood Studies. Childhood Studies explores children’s lives, but it also raises questions of childhood and what it is to be a child. These are questions that were little discussed before the 1980s, and it is the emergence of notions of child/childhood, it could be argued, that has led to the view that children’s wellbeing is important and should be placed within contemporary schooling.

The chapter will consider the concept of child and why it needs to be considered in relation to wellbeing in schools. It will suggest that there is a disconnect between how children are seen in schools, and society more generally, and the notion of wellbeing. The role of the teacher in the promotion of wellbeing will be discussed before turning our attention to an approach, Community of Philosophical Inquiry, which might allow for teachers’ and learners’ wellbeing that will support them to live well together.

Main findings

Concepts of child

Childhood, as we currently think of it in Western societies, is a relatively new phenomenon (Cunningham, 2006). Children in mediaeval times, suggests Postman (1994), existed in the same social sphere as adults; they had access to the world of work, the world of entertainment, of politics, religion, news and information. The divide between people was determined by class rather than age and it was with the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century that the difference between children and adults became more pronounced, mainly because people needed to be taught to read and the way in which this could be achieved was to send some individuals – children – to one place to learn, school. To be clear, not all children attended school and children did have their games and interests that were perhaps different to those of adults, but the suggestion is that in advancing the need to read, a distinction was made between two groups in society – children and adults. However, it was some considerable time after the invention of the printing press when the present notion of child and childhood was advanced.

Writing in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher, published two texts written to complement one another; one was The Social Contract, a treatise on the ideal state, and the other, a manifesto for educating children with the ideal state in mind, Emile, or Education. What is important in Emile is that Rousseau sets out five stages through which children progress in their development and within the early phases he advocates that children are breastfed, that their limbs are freed from the swaddling they are wrapped in and that they are encouraged to learn through experience in the natural world, away from corrupting adult society. He proposes that the time of being a child, childhood, is one that should be prolonged, that it is a time of innocence and that it should be protected. This was arguably the first time in Western thinking that childhood was thought of in such terms and, as a consequence, current thought and practice has adopted this perspective. Jenks (1996) would describe this as the Apollonian view of children, that they are born good and that it is society that corrupts them. Cook (2009) suggests that the view of children and childhood illustrated by Jenks’ Apollonian child is advanced and perpetuated because adults want to retain and protect their memories of their own childhood, a romanticised notion of happy and carefree times, an image with its roots in Rousseau’s Emile. Others such as Ryyst (2010, 2015) caution that we should be aware that as adults we view children/childhood through adult eyes and that we do so with the experiences we have had that children have not. As such, we run the risk of wrongly inferring things from our observations. In her 2010 study, Rysst spoke to ten-year-old girls about why they wanted to buy the kinds of clothes that older sisters or pop stars wore as these could be seen as sexy. However, the children roundly refuted this accusation, saying that they simply wanted to look like the people they admired and those people were grown-up.

Stables (2008) offers us three more ways of thinking about child/childhood that are important to the present chapter. The first way to think about children, he says, is to accept that we are all children because we all have parents. The second is determined by one’s age, for example, under Article 1 of the UNCRC a child is an individual under eighteen years of age, unless in their country they have attained the age of majority earlier, and this is usually determined by law. The third model is perhaps the most interesting and is linked to the Aristotelian notion of potential; the child is viewed in terms of its becoming. This notion is one that suggests childhood is a time when children are not yet ready to participate fully in the social world, that they have not learned what they need to learn and that their childhood is a time of preparation. It is what Kohan (2011, p. 342) refers to as ‘a revolutionary space of transformation’.

Child as becoming

Children are often not seen as complete beings, they are considered to be in a process of transition and they lack certain – necessary – qualities or attributes that adults possess (Kennedy, 2006; Cassidy, 2007, 2012). Adults, it seems, will rescue children from their childhood by preparing them well, by giving them the tools they will need in their future lives, by telling them what and how to think and behave. This deficit view of children is important in thinking about education broadly, and schooling more specifically. It situates children in positions where they have limited voice, power and influence and this is significant when speaking about children’s wellbeing.

The language of becoming is evident in much of the theory and practice around education. Curricula are written with a view to giving children the knowledge and skills they will need in the future, mainly in the world of work. Very little, it appears is done in schools that is not about training children for their roles in society when they have full access to it: their moral behaviour is regulated; they are taught how the world works through the likes of education for citizenship for when they will be able to make decisions; and their academic work is assessed, examined and measured in ways that determine their future paths. Take, for example, the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland which states that the aim is for children to become successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens (Scottish Executive, 2004). There is some rhetoric around preparing children for now and in their future lives, but the thrust of the documentation is forward-looking. There is, however, an interesting disconnect between the notion of becoming, as evidenced by school systems, structures and practices, and that is in the area of wellbeing.

Wellbeing and becoming

There is much recent literature related to the notion of children’s wellbeing, and what it all has in common is that the authors all agree that there is no consensus in offering a definition of wellbeing (see, for example: Amerijckx and Humblet, 2014; Mashford-Scott, Church and Taylor, 2012; Camfield, Streuli and Woodhead, 2009; Bourke and Geldins, 2007). In fact, what several authors have done is note that defining the concept is a difficult one, so they have asked children about their understanding of wellbeing. While there is not, and perhaps cannot be one fixed definition, there is some commonality. There is agreement that wellbeing relates to one’s social, emotional, intellectual, mental and physical wellness, linking wellbeing to health. Features that emerge as important in considering one’s social, emotional, intellectual, mental and physical wellness are grounded in the likes of relationships, community, respect, agency, autonomy, happiness, satisfaction and being valued.

Thorburn in Chapter 2 articulates different ways in which wellbeing might be considered. Drawing on Mill’s notion of maximising happiness is an attractive one when speaking about wellbeing, particularly when suggesting that one does this by advancing one’s own pleasure. Children are often accused of pursuing what may be called a hedonistic approach to wellbeing, but this is to omit an element of pleasure for Mill that is important. Certainly Mill promotes the idea of pleasure, but he speaks of higher and lower pleasures, where the higher, more academic pleasures are ones that should be sought in order to be happiest. More base pleasures such as eating chocolate or reading comics will be less likely to induce pleasure – wellbeing – than the more worthy activities advanced through the higher pleas...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of editors and contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Philosophical perspectives on wellbeing
• PART II Policy perspectives on wellbeing
• PART III Professional perspectives on wellbeing
• PART IV Practice perspectives on wellbeing
• PART V Future prospects for wellbeing
• PART VI A personal perspective on wellbeing
• Index