Co-designing school-based collaborative inquiry into student engagement and wellbeing as a pedagogical and democratic right

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
File version

Version of Record (VoR)

Author(s)
Whatman, Susan
Main, Katherine
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)
Date
2021
Size
File type(s)
Location

Virtual

License
Abstract

The surveillance and governing of schooling in Australia (Edwards-Groves, Grootenboer & Wilkinson, 2018) has nurtured a particular kind of performativity in addressing student wellbeing in schools. It has meant that teachers are required to collect more data and engage in ever-expanding forms of teacher work. The policy landscape in wellbeing has shifted enormously in just a few years with the formation of a national wellbeing hub in 2018 with national policies directing attention to key priorities, particularly around Mental Health, and the instigation of Wellbeing policy officers ‘on the ground’ in state jurisdictions (QDET, 2018; Thompson, 2018). Within this rapidly changing landscape, schools are encouraged to turn to outsourced provision of health education and wellbeing interventions by commercial providers through Australian Government funding (Sperka, Enright & McCuaig, 2018) and via State partnerships with both commercial and not-for-profit organisations which, as a ‘de-professionalising practice’ bring with it genuine concerns about the providers' intentions, the specificity and relevance to site-based priorities, and ultimately outcomes for students (Penney, Petrie & Fellows, 2015; Williams & Macdonald, 2015). However, many schools are also taking the initiative to design their own approaches to support student wellbeing. This paper discusses a project which has developed out of university-school discussions around supporting teachers to promote and enhance student (and teacher) wellbeing through a long-standing industry forum at our University. Together with teachers on each unique school site, the project team has co-designed a methodology that combines analysis of mandatory school reporting data on student engagement and other school-specific indicators of engaged students, with rich, in-depth narratives from teachers and school leaders. Facilitated focus group methods then generated teacher-designed conceptual maps of how they currently support student wellbeing along with descriptive statistical analyses of the student engagement trends. This paper shares methods in gathering data around wellbeing in schools and, in doing so, suggests how educators working together reclaims professionalism for teachers and enables pedagogical and democratic rights of students (Vitale & Exley, 2016). Teacher professionalism is reclaimed by university educators working together with teachers to highlight the richness of data collection in which they are already engaged and connecting it to their existing and future pedagogical choices and schooling routines (Beckett, 2013; Glasswell, Singh & McNaughton, 2016; Singh, 2015). This paper concludes that by coming to understand responses to perceived crises in wellbeing as fundamentally pedagogical, and that pedagogically responding to student wellbeing enables pedagogical rights of children, it is clear that teachers are best placed to gather evidence around and make decisions upon school-wide approaches to wellbeing

Journal Title
Conference Title

BERA Conference 2021

Book Title
Edition
Volume
Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
DOI
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement

© The Authors 2021. The attached file is posted here with permission of the copyright owner(s) for your personal use only. No further distribution permitted. For information about this conference please refer to the publisher’s website or contact the author(s).

Item Access Status
Note
Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject

Curriculum and pedagogy theory and development

Physical education and development curriculum and pedagogy

Persistent link to this record
Citation

Whatman, S; Main, K, Co-designing school-based collaborative inquiry into student engagement and wellbeing as a pedagogical and democratic right, BERA Conference 2021, 2021