Supporting children's cultural wellbeing through arts based education

Children's wellbeing is a central goal of schooling addressed in numerous ways within curriculum frameworks and standards. A little known aspect of wellbeing is cultural wellbeing, which is beginning to appear in education policy documents. While silences exist around cultural wellbeing within education literature, there is a growing body of literature on cultural wellbeing in other reference disciplines which provides potential insights for the field of education. In this article, emerging theories of cultural wellbeing are discussed in relation to data gathered from a case study of a cultural arts learning program conducted specifically for Aboriginal students at a public school in a small town in Northern Tasmania. The program offered space for Aboriginal students to strengthen their connections to their Aboriginal cultural heritage and community through learning contemporary and traditional arts skills and techniques. This case study contributes insights into understandings of cultural wellbeing and how arts education brought together with humanities and social sciences education can create enabling conditions for the development of children's cultural wellbeing.