The buddy bench and beyond: Exploring complexity-informed approaches to wellbeing education

Abstract

Enhancing wellbeing in educational settings is a challenging endeavour as wellbeing education is inherently complex. This interdisciplinary conceptual paper aims to bridge the gap between psychological interventions and educational contexts by adopting a complexity lens to consider the puzzle of wellbeing in educational settings. We draw on the fields of positive psychology, educational theory, complexity thinking, and indigenous worldviews to conceptualise wellbeing education and illustrate the need to weave approaches together. Embracing a complexity lens, we offer ways of prompting emergent wellbeing change: incorporating diverse perspectives, trialling nudges, and attending to interactions across the system. We argue that complexity-informed approaches to wellbeing education have the potential to create emergent change in and across complex educational systems.

Wellbeing integrated learning design framework: a multi-layered approach to facilitating wellbeing education through learning design and educational practice

“…The WILD framework draws on key psychological wellbeing theories and is designed to break our complex dynamic approach down into tangible processes for educators. We aimed to achieve this without minimizing complexity thinking by overlooking the interconnectedness and interdependencies between the framework's elements (Goodall et al, 2022).…”

“…This provided fertile ground to trial and iterate our approach across a large and diverse student population of more than 5,000 students over 4 years. In developing the WILD framework, we were cognizant that many of the common criticisms of positive education have been positioned as polarities (e.g., explicit vs. implicit, wellbeing vs. learning theory), and the inherent limitations in this binary and, at times, reductionistic approach (Goodall et al, 2022). Instead, one of the fundamental principles of our approach was to build an integrated framework that moves beyond positionality to an appreciation that each element is important and synergistically influences one another.…”

“…A key aspect of this approach has been to foreground Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing to both broaden students' understanding of wellbeing but also provide an exemplar of a systems model of wellbeing that has emerged over millennia. This decision is supported by Goodall et al (2022) who posit that "contextually-responsive and complexity-informed approaches to wellbeing in education settings are strengthened by valuing indigenous and local perspectives, knowledge and practices" (p. 91). f. Legacy Boards -In the final session of our subjects, one of our teaching practices is to include online legacy boards that are created by students using images of themselves and responses to questions such as, "what is one takeaway from this subject for your own life?"…”