Cultural wellbeing in Australian schools: Theorisations, provocations and implications for curriculum

Children’s wellbeing is identified as a central goal of schooling addressed in numerous ways within curriculum frameworks and school leadership standards. One little known aspect of wellbeing is its cultural dimensions. Cultural wellbeing has become part of educational policy, but there is little research specifically addressing this area.

What is cultural wellbeing and how is it relevant in education? What could cultural wellbeing look like within a classroom community? These questions form the inquiry of this presentation in which a PhD researcher and a Year 9 educator will share early findings from a study of cultural wellbeing currently being conducted in a Tasmanian Catholic college.

While silences exist around cultural wellbeing within educational literature, there is a growing body of literature on cultural wellbeing in other reference disciplines. Emerging theories of cultural wellbeing will be discussed in relation to data gathered from a case study of a unit of learning conducted within the Year 9 class by the educator and documented with the researcher.

This case study is part of a larger research project investigating cultural wellbeing in classroom communities through a grounded theory study which stands to offer insights into this little known aspect of wellbeing in education and its implications for curriculum.