Looking at wellbeing from all sides now: Supporting educators’ reflective wellbeing work through the application of a spatial metaphor

Abstract

Wellbeing continues to be a highly contested term. In the context of increasing pressures on educators to teach about wellbeing, this paper revisits and develops our earlier work (O’Brien and O’Shea 2017). It explores rather what it might mean to teach for wellbeing while taking seriously some of its more perplexing challenges. Reflecting on the conceptual complexity and challenges of wellbeing and wellbeing education, it argues for a reframing of these challenges in education to embrace a variety of significant perspectives across disciplines and fields. To this extent it supports a disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to wellbeing discourse. If wellbeing cuts across ethics, aesthetics, physical and mental health, economics, planetary and species survival, to name a few domains of relevance, it makes sense to employ a wider lens and deeper reflection. While identifying some of the main tensions across the wider discourse of wellbeing, we argue for a philosophical and a social science reframing that can stay attuned to the spatial-temporal conditions of our relational existence (Taylor 2018, Noddings 2012). In illustrating this method, we consider and critique some significant and influential ideas informing and framing psychological and sociological models of wellbeing in education.  Subsequent to this analysis of the social scientific contributions, we consider how philosophical inquiry and understandings of meaning-making and subjectivity can address deeper questions of wellbecoming. We challenge the dominant discourse in education that maintains an overly positive account of human nature, one that assumes happiness and wellbeing are unproblematically desirable.  We introduce a reflection on suffering and the negative aspects of human life, what we refer to as illbeing, as a necessary concept for thinking about wellbeing. Our findings suggest that it is not sufficient to merely outline the challenge of complexity in teaching about wellbeing but it is also necessary to know how to support students to find their own bearings in this new terrain. To this end we employ a spatial metaphor to address the one sidedness of the subject/object dualisms that characterise so much of the academic wellbeing discourse. It provides a new ethical orientation for students and teachers, a method for finding our bearings in uncertain and sometimes hazardous terrain, and perhaps a point of hope in a crisis of meaning.