All Roads Lead to Wellbeing

How does a child sense that they belong in a school? This question is the key to well-being. When we consider the broad shifts happening in education, this is where all roads are leading. 

There have been many shifts in schools over the past decade focusing on the relationship between a child and a school’s program. Schools have historically attempted to fit the child into the program rather than creating programs that fit the child. It’s a question of flexibility and responsiveness, relatively late arrivals to our educational landscape. In my education in the 70s and 80s, belonging meant fitting the system. It was a superficial type of belonging where the program did not recognise that students brought anything of real value to the community besides participation and compliance. In this environment, the only positive contribution students could make was to fit. Fit the program. Students adopted an identity to help them fit, regardless of its authenticity. An implication that was not lost on us as students in this sort of system, was that if we were there, or not there, it didn’t really matter. 

This sounds a bit harsh, but it certainly wasn’t all gloom and doom. I have fond memories of school and enjoyed the experience. We had lots of fun, but this fun did not include classes where the hands of the clock moved unimaginably slowly with the teacher’s drone, a barely muted background noise. I can recall a grade eight class that involved us furiously copying the teacher’s handwritten notes from an overhead projector every lesson. The good old OHP! The teacher's role was to growl at us every now and then to write faster, and change the transparent sheets with their almost-indecipherable hand-written script before all but the select few had finished copying the page. It seems hard to believe now, but this was normal. Our contribution to the learning process in this system was non-existent. There was no inquiry-inspired tuning in when the OHP was fired up. 

For a student, this was a peripheral existence, at best, on the very edge of the learning process. This wasn’t a problem, however, as it wasn’t questioned. As the school cultures we exist within are defined by the written and unwritten rules that govern our day-to-day lives, there wasn’t anything to question. I don’t think any of us, students, teachers or principals, could have imagined another way of going about the business of schooling. Fortunately, educational innovations since those school days of the 70s and 80s have largely been geared toward adjusting our practices to make students recognise the value of their unique identities and their contributions to the learning environment. That is, schools have been creating more flexible and responsive programs that can align better with a child’s unique needs. This is at the heart of a sense of belonging. The interactions and conversations that surround this flexibility and responsiveness of the system to the child’s needs are how a child comes to know that they are valued, the bridge between participation and belonging. 

In a recent LinkedIn article titled The Changing Face of Inclusion in IB Education, I looked at some shifts in approaches to inclusion over the past decade. Below is a short summary of these changes within an IB context in how we understand the place of a child in our educational programs: 

• From special educational needs to inclusive culture: The first shift was a move from a specific focus on Special Educational Needs (SEN) to a broader focus on inclusive culture, recognizing that when a child faces challenges in their learning, the solution lies not solely within the child but in their interactions with the school environment. It became clear that answers could be found by examining how the environment, including our often unconscious reactions, assumptions, and the written and unwritten rules shaping school culture, affects the child. This realization prompted much-needed critical reflection on how we create and sustain inclusive environments. 

• From school environment to social justice: The second shift expanded this perspective beyond the school environment to include wider social justice issues that impact a child's experience. Schools exist within a larger context of societal inequalities that have historically contributed to these injustices; a series of barriers in the broader social environment that are reflected in school and often invisible to those whose path is not blocked. As conversations around Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) gained momentum, eyes began to open and the conversations related to DEIJ began to intersect with discussions about how we support all students in our classrooms. The focus shifted from the school environment to the impact of broader social justice issues on the child’s experience of school. 

What does this mean for students? With the connection of so many concepts to what we think of as inclusion, the idea has become complex; diversity, inclusion, justice, value, belonging, well-being, barriers, culture, meaning, purpose and environment, to name just a few. What every one of these concepts has in common, though, at least in terms of their application in a school environment, is that they each add a degree of flexibility and responsiveness to a school program. Each of these concepts presents us with a challenge to redefine the limits of the malleability of our programs and as we have seen over the past decade, our precious educational programs are not as brittle as we once seemed to fear. They seem to have survived a little bending.

As we grapple with these complex, interconnected ideas, our program malleability increases. This malleability allows our programs to take advantage of the huge potential that the diversity of individual identities brings to our learning environments which promotes that all important sense of value in our students. A feeling of belonging is the ultimate outcome. As we have seen through a range of emerging studies on well-being, belonging and wellbeing are inextricably linked so although we are still trying to make sense of these connections, it seems like, when we consider the broad range of recent educational innovations and the ideas that are driving them, all roads are leading to wellbeing.