This book critically examines multiple discourses of wellbeing in
relation to the composite aims of schooling. Drawing from a Scottish
study, the book disentangles the discursive complexity, to better
understand what can happen in the name of wellbeing, and in particular,
how wellbeing is linked to learning in schools. Arguing that educational
discourses have been overshadowed by discourses of other groups, the
book examines the political and ideological policy aims that can be
supported by different discourses of wellbeing. It also uses interview
data to show how teachers and policy actors accepted, or re-shaped and
remodelled the policy discourses as they made sense of them in their own
work.
When addressing schools' responses to inequalities, discussions are
often framed in terms of wellbeing. Yet wellbeing as a concept is poorly
defined and differently understood across academic and professional
disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, health promotion, and social
care. Nonetheless, its universally positive connotations allow policy
changes to be ushered in, unchallenged. Powerful actions can be exerted
through the use of soft vocabulary as the discourse of wellbeing
legitimates schools' intervention into personal aspects of children's
lives. As educators worldwide struggle over the meaning and purpose of
schooling, discourses of wellbeing can be mobilised in support of
different agendas. This book demonstrates how this holds both dangers
and opportunities for equality in education. Amartya Sen's Capability
Approach is used to offer a way forward in which different
understandings of wellbeing can be drawn together to offer a perspective
that enhances young people's freedoms in education and their freedoms
gained through education.
