ABSTRACT
How do Australian secondary school students define wellbeing? The growth of wellbeing education programmes, whole-school wellbeing approaches, and strategic plans for wellbeing interventions are often introduced without engaging students systematically or co-designing material with them. Earlier research emphasised the potential benefits of engaging students and giving them a voice in the change process in education generally. Adopting Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory to problematise the issue of how students define wellbeing, this appreciative study thematically analyses the student responses from a case study collected for a wellbeing survey. The study investigates how Australian secondary school students (n=955) define wellbeing in their own words. The data were interpreted from one school site conducted from 2019 to 2021. This study focuses on students’ qualitative responses to the question, ‘In your own words, how do you define wellbeing?’ Overall, the case study illustrates that many students would define wellbeing as either binary experiences such as happy and sad or a more sophisticated definition drawing upon dimensions such as psychological definitions, cognitive elements, physical health, and spiritual development. The findings suggest that students are genuinely engaged in wellbeing and interested in learning more about it. It also supports the claim that students are naturally interested in learning more about wellbeing theory.
