Perspectivas diferenciales y antecedentes en las políticas públicas

Healthy connections with people

Healthy relationships and positive interactions among students and between students and educators are common features of educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing in this study. There is also an emphasis on the qualities of the relationships between students and their peers, families and communities which arts educator Kathryn described as a “connectedness to other people”.

Middle school teacher Natalie perceived that cultural wellbeing centred

around this relationship, which she depicted as “the triangle of the school, the parents, and in the middle is the student”. She commented further, “It’s very important that all the parties feel comfortable in their situation so it really can grow” (Natalie). The school, parents and students are key actors in this depiction of cultural wellbeing (although the ecosystem view also locates other external actors, including the school system and broader society). This view that cultural wellbeing is linked with the quality of the relations between people was also emphasised by Stella:

connections that you have within your place that you reside. So, it is those simple things of sharing experiences together with other people. (Stella)

The school-community arts project co-produced by Stella aimed to increase connections between the school and its community by bringing parents and carers into the school grounds to work together with their children. The arts project was designed to support healthy relationships between children, families and school staff, building on the idea that schools are “embedded in multiple social contexts that interact with surrounding social, cultural, and physical environments” (Berkowitz, Moore, Astor, & Benbenishty, 2017, p. 33), which influence school culture and students’ wellbeing (Thomas et al., 2016). The influence that Stella described as important for cultural wellbeing was to do with experiences shared with other people which she perceived as contributing to positive relationships and the “richness” of life in a community.

Kindergarten teacher Chelsea echoed this view of cultural wellbeing as a richness of life, depicting cultural wellbeing as a “healthy culture of support for each other and healthy culture of respect for diversity. It’s having a culture that’s not in conflict.” This reference to conflict was not further elaborated upon by Chelsea, nevertheless, Chelsea’s perception of cultural wellbeing as relating to an absence of conflict raises a question about the possibilities for cultural wellbeing in

circumstances where conflict is present. The meaning of conflict is unspecified by kindergarten teacher Chelsea, however from the broader context of the interview it appears she is referring to conflict in the sense of violence*_{. The topic of violence was}

evident in the interviews with Lauren, Valerie and Kirsty who noted its presence in

the home and school lives of students and spoke of cultural wellbeing as requiring them to establish classroom communities as spaces where healthy relationships flourished. Valerie alluded to violence in students’ home lives in her comment “for some children I have worked with, home sometimes isn’t a safe space.” Lauren detailed the conflict more directly commenting “In my school community, it’s quite a low socio-economic area; these children are frequently coming from homes where there’s discontent, homes where there’s domestic violence.” Conflict was also reported by educators as being present in school relationships. Art teacher Kirsty described the violence of bullying being “this sort of culture that is quite big in the high school”. Recent research indicates that bullying is an extensive problem in Australian schools which has led to an array of bullying prevention policies and programs, but that more needs to be done to understand and address the broader social and cultural underpinnings of the problem (Herne, 2016).

Healthy relationships are important aspects of students’ wellbeing (Thomas et al., 2016), and educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing offered insights into the important roles schools can serve as spaces away from violence experienced outside of school. However, their perspectives also drew attention to the violence that can occur within schools and the need for schools to support students in fostering healthy relationships.

Healthy connections with, and uses of, places

A common theme evident in the data was that educators perceived cultural wellbeing was associated with students’ connections to places and especially to nature. Charles, co-producer of a school-community arts program, suggested cultural wellbeing “is about sense of place… and it’s being able to take that further than sense

exchange of sense of place with someone”. Charles and co-producer Stella designed the arts program with a strong emphasis on place, bringing together children and families in the school grounds to build billy carts for the children to play with in local streets.

Experiencing a “sense of place” was important for cultural wellbeing in Charles’ view. The notion of a sense of place reflects the tendency for people to form emotional bonds with places (Williams & Stewart, 1998) and has been described as a living ecological relationship between a person and a place (Cobb, 1977). This raises the prospect that cultural wellbeing is related to people’s everyday lived experiences in the places they inhabit. This draws attention to the qualities of school environments and places in which schooling is conducted and their potential for supporting cultural wellbeing.

Kindergarten teacher Chelsea was another educator who perceived a strong connection between place and cultural wellbeing. In her experience of working closely with young children, Chelsea perceived cultural wellbeing benefits from an active engagement amongst students and outdoor environments and explained what cultural wellbeing would look like in her class:

Children would be collaborating with each other and they would be supporting each other and communicating well. Outdoors you would see a lot more crossover of social groups, you’d see a great deal of intermingling between the children. And they would be working together, they’d be carrying big logs up the hill together, making beautiful aesthetic sorts of things together in the bush. (Chelsea)

Chelsea’s comments here suggest cultural wellbeing may relate to the ways students interact with the places and the materials of schooling. Chelsea perceived the outdoors offered many natural learning resources and was a less constrained space than indoors, where student learning was limited by the materials she could make available to the students. Chelsea depicted the location where the activity of schooling takes place as consequential for cultural wellbeing in terms of the freedom it afforded children in working, socialising and collaborating together, and the materials it provided for them to work with together.

A link between experiences of the world and cultural wellbeing is evident in the perception of primary teacher Rick who taught in a regional school:

For me, cultural wellbeing would be to expand [students’] knowledge of the world that they live in, not the big world, but the world that they live in, and that is taking them to places that they don’t necessarily go or showing them things that they don’t necessarily get to see. (Rick)

In interpreting cultural wellbeing as related to enlarging students’ worlds, Rick emphasised the importance of connecting with the worlds that students “live in” rather than the “big world”. This clarification was not inconsequential. Rick teaches in a low SES regional school, in a suburb that is stigmatised for its low SES status. Rick’s comments offer an example of how educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing were responsive to students’ contexts. Rick further noted that he knew many of his students “don’t go beyond” the local department store, indicating that he perceived many of the students in his class led very localised lives. Giving students expanded access to experiences and, importantly, locations beyond their current boundaries suggested that Rick perceived cultural wellbeing to have a spatial quality.

In this way, the concept of cultural wellbeing appears to involve activating and accessing encounters which enlarged students’ worlds, both experientially and spatially.

The idea of cultural wellbeing as expanding students’ worlds was shared by other educators and included encountering people in the community outside of the classroom. Kindergarten teacher Chelsea suggested cultural wellbeing involved

being aware of the bigger world than just your own so you’re not just looking at your own narrow cultural experiences, but through

education, through experiences, children need to come into contact with the wider world, outside the four classroom walls… It’s going out and connecting with the community. (Chelsea)

Chelsea sought to expand students’ awareness beyond their own worlds, while Rick’s interpretation of cultural wellbeing emphasised the importance of remaining connected to the everyday world his students lived in while also expanding beyond their current localised boundaries. While the educators made these comments in response to questions of cultural wellbeing, education scholars and theorists note that such enlarged experiences of the world are also vital for learning and healthy

development (Biesta, 2015; Bronfenbrenner, 1995b; Ewing, 2010; Gergen, 2009; Greene, 1995).

This finding was evident across low, average and high SES locations, however analysis across the data revealed patterns whereby educators in high SES schools described being able to access a variety of encounters beyond the school, while some educators in low SES schools described constraints which appeared to limit their

access to encounters outside the classroom. This finding is interrogated further in Chapter 6.

Present in educators’ accounts of cultural wellbeing in classroom communities was the sense of school being a human space. This appeared through their emphasis on the need to first and foremost recognise students’ humanity, their values and rights as human beings worthy of a “quality education”. All educators in the study talked about cultural wellbeing in relation to the contexts of their students’ lives. The human-ness and the life circumstances of the occupants of classroom communities infused educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing, which resonated with their insights into students’ lives both inside and beyond the classroom.

Educators’ perceptions of cultural wellbeing were commonly concerned with responding to the challenges that students encounter. When reflecting on cultural wellbeing, Dan referred to the remedial qualities of outdoor spaces for helping his students deal with social pressures of contemporary life:

I think for us, from our point of view, the outdoors offers a wonderful avenue to be able to look at those topics and sort of remove the other layer of crap, if you don’t mind me saying, that’s associated with some of the day-to-day environments, some of the technologies, some of the peer rubbish, that they’ve got to deal with... we’re very much aware, particularly as students get towards teenage years, that there’s all these other external factors they are trying to balance and deal with. (Dan) Here Dan connects his role as an outdoor educator to students’ contexts in indicating how the school is able to provide healthy spaces for students to deal with

some of the pressures that surround them. Asked to elaborate upon some of these external pressures, Dan explained:

I guess as you get into year 9, 10,11 and 12, some of the different social environments they might find themselves in, exposure to things like alcohol, drugs, getting your driver’s license, access to money, credit cards, debts, girlfriends, sex, going through puberty and having a body that is changing on you, and all of a sudden not knowing what you’re capable of in terms of your physical strength... Just things like that, on top of everything else is, all of a sudden, a bit of a mixed bag, and I think, well we know that a lot of kids struggle at that point. (Dan)

Identifying the “crap” (as he termed it) of students’ day-to-day worlds as a challenge to cultural wellbeing, Dan revealed the social milieu in which young people exist creates complex scenarios for students to negotiate and is part of students’ embodied experiences of school. This embodiment of students’ lifeworlds is part of the circumstance of the classroom community which educators incorporated into their interpretations of cultural wellbeing. Dan’s depiction of the “layer of crap” illustrated his concerns for student wellbeing in a context of ongoing change and uncertainty.

To summarise, educators perceived cultural wellbeing in classroom communities has an affective quality that involves healthy connections to people, places and cultures. This is neatly summarised in the comments of kindergarten teacher Chelsea that cultural wellbeing was “to do with the people that you live with, and the places you live and connections that unite places and people… And if you have really healthy connections you have cultural wellbeing.” In the next section I turn from considering how educators interpret the concept of cultural wellbeing to

present the findings of the ways that educators perceived they support cultural wellbeing in classroom communities.

5.2 Research question 2: How do educators

support cultural wellbeing in classroom

communities?

When asked to describe their perceptions of supporting cultural wellbeing, the educators in this study described enlisting pedagogies and practices that are, in many instances, intended to enhance students’ capacities to navigate the conditions they encounter inside and outside of their school lives. The findings indicate that these practices are encouraged (and sometimes discouraged) by school leadership. This section engages with the perspectives of multiple educators in the study to explore how they supported cultural wellbeing. A summary of the practices and pedagogies that educators described employing to support cultural wellbeing appears in Appendix G.