Contextual Well-being in Education - A Conversation with Dr. Helen Street

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So I think a lot of the approaches towards trying to support mental health and wellbeing in schools are actually part of the problem. And so it's really more pressing than ever to not only consider that it is a problem, but to really carefully think about what does that mean and what can we do about it.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notoch. It's a huge pleasure to be able to bring you this conversation with Helen Streete, where we talk about wellbeing as an organisational or contextual opportunity rather than as an individual focus. Helen is a social psychologist and educator and has worked extensively with schools around the world since 1999. She holds a position as Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and the Graduate School of Education, as well as an adjunct research consultant for the Health Department of Western Australia's Centre for Clinical Interventions. Helen is the founder and co-chair of the Positive Schools Initiative. Since its launch in 2008, the Positive Schools Initiative has worked with over 26,000 educators from 6,000 schools and colleges around Australia and 15 other countries. Positive Schools Initiative is focused on taking an evidence-based systems approach to building contextual wellbeing, positive mental health, and resilience in school staff, parents, and young people. Helen is also a bestselling author and speaker, and her most recent book is Contextual Wellbeing: Creating Positive Schools from the Inside Out. Well, firstly, thank you so much for joining. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. I saw you— I wasn't in Adelaide, sadly, but I saw you gave an amazing keynote speech at the recent IB Global Conference and just was really keen to talk to you about your work around contextual wellbeing. So thank you for joining, firstly.

Oh, thank you for asking me. It's a pleasure. Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Fantastic. So just to start, in terms of just thinking about why this is such important work, I do believe it is. I think there are all sorts of reasons why young people might be struggling in relation to education, the schooling system, and generally across, you know, in different aspects of their lives right now. So I just would love to ask you, where do you see, and maybe also from an Australia perspective, what are the particular challenges that you think the schooling system needs to address and speak to in relation to, you know, youth wellbeing?

Okay, well, yeah, good starting point. Well, I feel that across the world there's, there's definitely a sort of a fairly universal united viewpoint that mental health is something that needs desperately addressing in young people. And there's a lot of agreement that the mental health in young people is worse than it used to be, worse than it was 5 years ago, which is worse than it was 10 years ago. For a long time, we just wondered if we were better able to detect poor mental health and people were more interested in mental health and, and coming forward and discussing it. But it feels it's far more than that, and, and that young people are definitely struggling. And moreover, I believe that not only are we seeing a lot of clinically diagnosable mental health conditions, but there's also huge numbers of young people who are just not thriving as well as we would like them to be. They're more surviving school rather than seeing it as a really meaningful, valuable time in their lives. So that is, is one reason why absolutely people are interested in supporting mental health. But in terms of the timeliness of thinking about what I'm doing, I'm really concerned that this sort of growing interest is not necessarily leading to the most positive action. And in effect, you know, it's been said to me more than once, well, you know, we can do no harm. Even if we're not getting all of our attempts quite right. Well, I actually feel that we can do a lot of harm by looking at and understanding mental health and well-being in a way that doesn't necessarily support its development. So I think a lot of the approaches towards trying to support mental health and well-being in schools are actually working against that and are actually part of the problem.

Interesting.

And so it's really more pressing than ever to not only consider that it is a problem, but to really carefully think about what does that mean and what can we do about it? So that's really, I suppose, the double-edged sword and the, the two reasons why I feel the time is really now. One, there's such a need, but two, there is such a misfiring of what we're doing.

Interesting. Yeah, no, and I'd love to get onto that in terms of positive education and your Positive Schools Initiative. And just in terms of Australia where you are based now, is there, in, in relation to the kind of way that, that it is globally, what's the kind of the picture for young people in schools in Australia in particular?

I think that overall I'm finding that there's huge concern for, for well-being, and often mentioned is anxiety. So there is a sort of sense that the levels of anxiety are really high, and that anxiety is exhibited in, in many ways. But for example, there is more students that are dealing with school refusal. That's definitely a growing issue. There's more students that are just struggling overall with general anxiety or performance anxiety, social anxiety. So that's definitely a major concern and talked about a lot. I guess there's sort of been a flip side to that. There's a concern of a lack of resilience, but I feel that we have to be really careful when we— in terms of thinking, well, what does that actually mean? And if young people are feeling traumatized and stressed and overwhelmed, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're lacking in resilience. It could simply mean that they're dealing with a lot of enormous stress. Yeah, in terms of other concerns, I mean, a lot of people are talking about the impact of COVID restrictions, possibly more than COVID itself. And I think that, you know, it's important to acknowledge that for some young people, especially in the early days of restrictions, it was actually a really beneficial thing that they could suddenly learn from home and not have to deal with all the social complexities of friendship groups and falling out with people and performance, etc., etc. But over time, certainly for a lot of people, there was a sense of social isolation, and that's possibly a loss of confidence. Yeah, it seems to have had an impact for sure. That's not good. Why that is though is still open to question. I wonder in part if removing people away from unhealthy school systems has allowed them to see how unhealthy those systems are a little bit more fully. That's possibly not the most popular view, but I think it's one that is really worth exploring.

It is.

And So there's so many inequities and illogical ways of doing things in education, but once you're in the middle of it and it's just the way the world is, we don't necessarily question that. But to be taken away from that and then to look more objectively from the outside, you're, you're more likely to see there's, there's problems.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I've not heard that, but it makes a lot of sense that, that a bit of distance, you know, it's like, you know, you don't see the water you're swimming in, but if you kind of come out and look at it, there is, there is a sense that why is it like this? And you know, there is potentially some, some quite destructive impacts of the way that it is, but we just accept it cuz that's just how it is, right? But maybe it doesn't have to be.

Yes. So I think it's very easy to, to just blame the pandemic, but what does that actually mean? Or it's very easy to say, oh, well people weren't at school, therefore they're now anxious about going. But that doesn't really make sense either, does it? Because you know, I'm sure if everyone was invited to Disneyland or whatever, then even though that they might have not been for a long time or ever, it's not going to start them rushing through the gateway. So I think it's something more than, than a long absence that, that is creating the anxiety.

Yeah. And one of the things I'd love to ask you about, because I was really interested to read in your earlier career, one of the recent episodes we've released with Mary Helen Imodino-Jang, who's a neuroscientist based in University of Southern California, She talks a lot about the goal-directed nature of the education system and how that plays into the executive control network within the brain. And then just ev, you know, with everything very, very heavily focused on this goal direction, there's no space for this default mode network and these other, this other kind of more reflective transcendent thinking that, that she talks about in her work. Fascinating stuff. Yeah. But I was really interested to see that also in your earlier work, thinking about conditional goal setting, the theory that you had coined earlier on and developed, which has now become quite widespread and influential as part of mental health diagnoses or academic work around looking at mental health. So I'd love to ask you about that, cuz that's definitely one of the things we see in the school system. There's, there's so much about goal setting that kind of determines the outcomes that have preset the, the young people's life outcomes. All of this kind of obsession of the parents' need for, you know, where's my child gonna be? In 2 years, 10 years. There's all this kind of goal obsession in the education system. And I wonder just firstly if you could say a bit more about what that conditional goal setting idea is and where you think that kind of connects with the education system.

Sure. Gosh, there's so many things you've mentioned in one go there. So I'll take a step.

Just dive in.

So the theory of conditional goal setting is a theory I put together, which was actually part of my PhD. So That's going back more than 25 years now, sort of nearly 30 years ago. And at that time, I was, I was really interested in looking at causes for depression or vulnerability to depression. And there seemed to be this sort of real gap in our understanding of vulnerability to depression around motivation and goal setting. So the theory of conditional goal setting, very simply, says that if you make your well-being conditional upon the achievement of one or more goals, then you are going to be more vulnerable to depression, whether or not you achieve those goals. So to give you a sort of like a simple example, if I think I won't be happy till I get married, you know, I'm in my mid-20s and I'm on my own and I can't find anyone, I'm not going to be happy till I get married. And every time I think about the fact I'm not yet married, I'm still single, I'm, I'm gonna be ruminating about that because I've associated not having the goal with not yet being happy. So I've got an association that that is a lack of success in terms of my own measure of success and a lack of well-being. We know rumination links very heavily to depression. So then if I carry on and I just can't find that right person and I stay single, then I, I'm going to just carry on ruminating and be quite vulnerable to depression because I feel like I just haven't got what, what you need in life to be well. If I do find someone, and then suddenly there's a possibility I might achieve my goal, and so I might be quite elated about that, and maybe I have the big white wedding and, or whatever it is that I envisaged to represent my union with my other person. And I feel quite elated that I found this person because this is what I need for my well-being. But it's human nature that when we have a moment of elation as a result of achievement, that we then habituate to that achievement quite quickly, and we tend to drop back down to our former level of well-being, which is, in my case, would have been quite a lot of dissatisfaction. So I, I feel, oh wow, I've got married, or I'm together, or I'm in, you know, whatever it was my goal. And then I might feel a bit despondent a short while after that because the excitement of that's now worn off.

Yeah.

And now I'm a bit flat. So what do I do? I say, okay, I have to have a child now. Now then I'll be happy.

Next, onto the next thing.

I have to get my first house. Or, and so it's a sort of never-ending cycle of moments of elation and lots of periods of rumination and despondency and feeling discontent. And Of course, you know, when we sort of judge how well we are, it's not about those little moments. It's about our more day-to-day sense of wellness as we live life. So in that sense, people who are conditional goal setters are quite vulnerable to depression because it's not an absolute thing. So some people, you know, we're all going to do it to some degree. We're going to think, oh gosh, you know, if I paid off the mortgage, more at my end of life, it might be a bit easier. And it's not that there's no reality to that, but if I sort of— it's about sort of the degree to which you do it and how much you feel those endpoints are about your well-being.

Yeah.

So now sort of like fast forward through time. So that theory, yeah, has got grown in attention. It's my own research took it into palliative care, people dealing with chronic illness, um, people dealing with eating disorders. And it is definitely a factor. It's not the factor, but it's a factor in understanding some of those ways of dealing with difficulties and how that impacts your well-being. And that's really what took me into schools as well, because I wanted to know what was going on with young people. And it was interesting for me in my first sort of research done with young people in schools, which is now back in about 2000, I guess. It was really interesting to find that young people, as in 11, 12-year-olds, who set goals that were more conditional were already more vulnerable to poor mental health. They were more likely to be anxious, they were more likely to have dysphoria or show sort of less positive mood. So I think we're creating more of a vulnerability, but also the level at which goals were set. So people who set goals that were about a specific outcome, like being popular or famous, or, you know, I want to be a TikTok influencer. Yeah, it's popular nowadays.

Exactly.

That sort of goal was related to somebody who was much more vulnerable to dealing with poor mental health than people who had really big goals that were more about, I want to have meaningful relationships, get along with my friends, go on adventures— goals that were more about a journey. So I think that that sort of also ties into how it's not just about what goals we have, but it's about how we frame them in terms of what's conditional upon achieving, achieving them or getting to them. What is success about progress, or is it about some particular end result? Yeah. And then most recently, over the last maybe 6, 7 years, when I've become really interested in value-driven living, I think that, I suppose, simply put, that there's a quite a big difference between those who understand their goals as the ultimate destination and measure of success if they can reach that goal. And those that understand goals as signposts, that it doesn't really matter if you ever get there. A goal is just to sort of keep you on track with what matters. So I wrote an article a little while ago called Strong Goals Held Loosely, which was a phrase I've pinched from the climber Alex Honnold, who I'm absolutely in awe of. So he famously did this ridiculously insane climb up the side of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without any equipment or help or support. Unbelievable. But what I really intrigued me about him was how he, his sort of really solid, strong level of well-being and how engaged he is in his life, and how before he did this successful climb, which was made into Oscar-winning movie, he actually had an attempt that he didn't get very far with because he had a— was still struggling from an injury. And he had this whole film crew in place, he had invested years of his life in training for race, and then he pulled out. And yet he wasn't devastated. He was disappointed, but he was fine. And when interviewed about that, he said, well, I set strong goals held loosely. I set goals at the beginning of the climbing season that allow me to live according to what matters. So I might set 10 really important goals and things I really want to do, but I only expect to achieve about 5 or 6 of them. And that's fine because it's not about achieving the goals, it's about the fact they keep me on track. In his case, to be out in nature, climbing out with his climbing friends, et cetera, et cetera. So I feel that's another way of understanding goals. It's really important.

That's so, yeah, no, I mean, again, there's so many connecting points there. I think what you said about signposts and that whole, I mean, I love that phrase, strong goals held loosely, but I think there's a tendency We have this flip-flop in education. It's like, well, if that's not the way to do it, then let's go fully to the other side of the binary. And, you know, as though it's like an on-off, right? So, oh, goal setting must be bad. That's a terrible idea. Let's just stop all goal setting. And it's not. And I think that's really important, just as you've just made the point that it's not the goals are inherently evil somehow. It's that there is a way that they can be framed that might provide direction. And that's where it connects for me to some of the work around complexity that I think is really important that I've been doing with Dave Snowden and people like that. There's a sense of direction that is really important in people's lives and in, in organizations and a sense of progression as well, whatever that means.

But yeah, we need to feel that we're progressing, growing, becoming more competent.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But holding them loosely and not being obsessed with the fact that they have to be particular outputs or outcomes because again, that's another obsession in education. It's so much about the output and the outcome, which I think we'll get onto when we talk a bit more about contextual wellbeing. Love to. But just before we go there, I think there's something I found really powerful in your work making this point really strongly. Because so personally, I was involved in wellbeing quite significantly earlier on in my career when I was an assistant principal in schools and we were doing a lot of work around positive education. With Martin Seligman's work and his different theories around wellbeing and happiness, authentic happiness, the wellbeing framework, character traits, all of those different aspects from University of Pennsylvania. Really fascinating work and a really, I think, important shift in people's mind that we need to take wellbeing seriously, right? You know, perhaps before that there was this sense that, well, we have to fix problem children. There are certain young people that struggle and we just have to make sure that they're all right, but otherwise we're just focusing on teaching and learning, and this is the thing that we're doing. So one, one of the things we were trying to do was make the strong connection between what we do in terms of teaching and learning, and wellbeing is an integral part of that. So connecting it with wellbeing, and that the work of Martin Seligman, et cetera, was quite useful there. But what I found really interesting in your work was taking that on and, and differentiating between the positive education framing and what you call positive schools. And I think there's a really fundamental and important difference between those two things.

Yeah.

Yeah. That I'd love to ask you about. And if you could explain, you know, what's the missing piece in the positive education framing?

Gosh. Well, I think there's a couple of missing pieces. I mean, I, I think you, you are right, you know, to, to give credit to the sort of the surge of interest in the, even the naming of positive psychology. I think that it's certainly given people more interest in well, what are we aiming for if we're like trying to address our mental health, not just what we're trying to get away from? Yeah, if we're struggling, what is it that we actually want to be and what does that look like? Um, so I think that's the sort of the positive side of it. And I, and I went through my own work, I think it sort of in terms of considering a more positive approach to therapy, which was my own sort of book from around that time with George Burns, I think it's really useful I think a lot of people who are struggling with their mental health can become almost like sort of semi-professional in their understanding of their issue, you know, and they have this sort of like really focused understanding of treatments and medication and symptoms and what they're dealing with, but they maybe don't spend anywhere near that amount of time or give that amount of energy to thinking, well, what does look good? What, what does better look like?

Yeah.

And it's certainly not just an absence what you're struggling with. So to sort of shift people to think in terms of solutions, to take a more appreciative approach to their mental health, I think is a really positive thing. Yeah. However, I feel that it's really problematic to consider that a better understanding of wellbeing means that we need to sort of deliberately now teach people how to be well, especially If that teaching people how to be well involves telling people how to be well without even inviting them to that conversation, but it's actually saying, this is your well-being method, and we're not going to— I mean, I'm laughing when I'm saying it because I think it's a ridiculous idea, really. And so this is sort of one of the issues that we talk to a coveted audience in, in terms of well-being classes, and people sit down, children in classes, and we'll say, no, we're going to talk about the concept of gratitude, which is a really important element of A lot of people who experience a lot of wellbeing tend to be very appreciative in, in their approach to life. But that doesn't mean that you can sit a class of 25 14-year-olds down and tell them all to write a gratitude letter and think that that's going to somehow make them all feel more cheery. I don't feel it works like that, because one thing, you're assuming causality. Another, they might— they haven't invested or bought into that necessarily.

Yeah.

And that can backfire in many ways. And you can end up actually creating worse mental health in a child who's sitting there thinking, well, actually I feel pretty miserable and I don't think I've got anything to be grateful for.

Yeah.

Often these things are sort of quite diluted, watered down, lost in translation and forced on people. So that is one problem.

Yeah.

A second bigger problem is the fact that all a lot of this sort of approach understands people as individuals and thinks about wellbeing as something we hold within us. And so there's a sort of sense that that translates into thinking that the best way to support well-being in others is to give them knowledge and skills. And if we could give each person enough knowledge and skills, then they would be happier, they would live a more well life, which to me is completely negating to consider the fact that we're not just human beings, we're social beings, we're people. And absolutely, we're all born unique But from the moment we're born, how we understand ourselves is all about how we connect with the world in terms of everything from our just understanding self versus other, right versus wrong, good versus bad. Are we lovable? Are we likable? Just learning language is, is a way of learning to frame and think about things in a certain way. We learn about sort of preferences and, you know, if, if your favorite color is blue, it's because of your influences. So everything about who you become as a social being is contextual.

Yeah.

And therefore, surely it's sort of like, it makes sense to, to consider that if you want to be well as a social being, you have to consider your relationship with context and the relationship of the context with you. So I feel that, that it's a dangerous thing to focus purely on individuals. And it's a much more useful thing to think about the spaces between us, to think about how the connection between context and self. I, I think a nice way of thinking about it, it's like a spider in a web really.

Mm-hmm.

So if each of us is a spider in our own sort of spinning our web of wellbeing connection to our context, absolutely. It helps to learn social skills and emotional regulation and ways of spinning that web well to connect with the world around you. But if you build your web in a wind tunnel or someone walks through it every day, you're still not going to be held by that web. It's going to be destroyed every day, so you're not going to be well. So when it comes to thinking about schools specifically, absolutely, I think that it's of use to support children and young people, I should say, in learning to connect well with the context of their lives. And things like emotional regulation, assertiveness, social skills training, understanding relationships better, dealing with unhealthy relationships, dealing with conflict— all of these things can be really, really useful. But I guess I sort of like really, really focus on the value of context, because unless we do that, unless we put more attention on the actual system and the context of the school and how it's operating, we're never going to change or challenge it. We're just going to constantly be holding children accountable and for their own well-being, no matter what. So that sort of is the second biggest issue. And then the third— I could go on all day about this, so keep it to three. Yeah, the third one that I really have a problem with is, as I was saying at at the beginning of our conversation, my PhD, my early research was all about motivation and goal setting. And I'm still fascinated by motivation and engagement, goal setting, and how these sort of more social psychological topics link to mental health. And I think that a lot of positive psychology, and then following on from that, positive education, comes from an understanding of clinical psychology, which is about sort of one-on-one therapy. It's, it's doesn't really include much understanding of motivation or engagement. And so a lot of attempts to support well-being en masse in schools have come with a really poor understanding of motivation, and we've ended up with all of these methods that are about control and compliance rather than supporting self-determination and autonomous self-directed behavior.

Amazing. I mean, there's so many things there, aren't there? The kind of the stories about mindfulness classes in toxic work environments or toxic schools. I mean, it's just like, oh, it's fine, we'll give you this spa treatment at the end of a toxic environment.

Yeah, it's like competition is everything and you've got to pass your ATR or final year exams. Really, really high marks, and here's a glitter jar. Yeah, I really don't think that anybody working in that positive education world really does think quite that.

No, exactly.

I mean, but nonetheless, the failure to consider the power of context is so enormous, we have to rethink what we're doing.

I completely agree. I completely agree. And I, yeah, I mean, we're being a little bit facetious about the glitter jars, etc., but for me at that time in the kind of early 2006, '07, that was a quite important shift for me personally as a professional educator thinking, well, these schools are just so obsessed about academic outputs that a focus on wellbeing would be an important counter to that, right? So there's kind of an evolution there that I'm just reflecting on my own journey with it. But I mean, I couldn't agree more about the importance of the context. And I'd love to talk to you more about that in relation to contextual wellbeing. But I also have to say that Just yesterday, I love that I'm having this conversation with you today, cuz yesterday I was with Nora Bateson in the school in Switzerland, and there is just so much connection there around the importance of context. I mean, the, it, her theory of warm data and all of those ideas is just, it's all about the influence and the web of context. And I think, I hope there's an increasing awareness as kind of ideas around complexity and systems thinking and these kinds of things become a bit more nuanced and a bit more mainstream. There's a sense that people are realizing just quite how important that is. But I also think I'd love also just to reflect on the individualism aspect, cuz like this is something I keep coming back to that there's such a kind of toxic obsession with individualism in, in certain mainstream education, you know, not everywhere necessarily, but kind of this somewhat globally exported version of competitive academic education that we've got in K-12, the race to universities, all of those things. There's an obsession with the individual in that and that kind of individual competition. Yeah. And we realize there are so many issues with that in so many ways as we see our young people grow and realize that, well, hold on a minute. As you said, you know, these, all these conditional goals I've set for myself, me, myself, and I, but what about all this, these other things that seem to suddenly be coming up for me that are really important? In terms of relationships and in terms of meaning in life, et cetera. So I just think your, your work is so important to redress that balance and that focus on the contextual.

Yeah. And otherwise you end up, you know, you end up one of the millions of adults sitting in middle age thinking, I feel like my life's rushing away from me. I'm trying to get ahead the whole time and I don't really know what I want to do. Mm-hmm. And I, and I think that that's huge. It's because you've, you've, you've sort of been trained to rush through life looking ahead, trying to achieve your goals and then onto the next one. And you haven't really learned how to be alive right now.

Yeah.

And, and 5 minutes on Monday morning doing mindfulness is just not gonna cut it. It's not really about that. It's about how you live your life day to day. And if you do invest in mindfulness meditation, which is fantastic, it's about really understanding what that's about. You can't just take a group of young people or a group of staff or a group of anyone and just say, oh, we're all going to like, you know, sit and breathe and focus on— because you've got to have buy-in, you've got to have people on board with that. And that's got to be translated into thinking about the bigger picture of your life.

I know, I know. I think that's also a really important aspect because there's a sense that there's somehow a recipe. I mean, you know, take the PERMA framework, right? For wellbeing. So positive emotions, engage— I see your, I see your face, pulling faces. Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. It's like, you know, okay, if we've got all those 5 things, all will be well. And it's, there's a danger of a radically context-free recipe there for an individual to have all those things. Okay, I'll collect all those things and then I'll be fine wherever I am, whether I'm in Sub-Saharan Africa or in Vietnam or in, you know, the outback of Australia, it's irrelevant. It's just they're universally important recipes for my wellbeing. So I better just start collecting.

And then, yeah. And it sort of like dangerously minimizes the power and value of distressing emotions, uncomfortable feelings and emotions, which is so important. And it was interesting, you know, I can't think who wrote this, but I was just scrolling through Twitter, which is probably—

is a dangerous hobby.

Yeah, dangerous thing to do nowadays. But there was someone who'd asked this question, what's the most useful thing you took from therapy? And there was a huge number of replies, and a huge number of the replies said that it was okay to be upset, or that there was power and a message or information within my my distressing feelings and behaviors and reactions. And, and I feel that, that saying positive emotion is, is a driver of well-being is a dangerous thing. It's more that that's more like a, an experience of feeling well or feeling well connected and having your needs met, isn't it? So that, and then, which is a sort of a whole different level to engagement, which is something that is more like driving and creating well-being. But again, it depends what you're engaged in and how. Relationships. I'll tick that one. That's great.

Exactly.

But then it's not just relationships with other people, it's relationships with the space that you're in. It's relationships within the norms, within the policy, within, you know, so again, it's a, it's a broader understanding of the fact that we're influenced by all aspects of our context, not just what someone's saying to us.

Yeah.

And then you've got what meaning, I think. Yeah. Finding meaning in your life is absolutely important, but again, that's maybe more diving into all of the stuff we were talking about just now about goals and values and how you're measuring your ideas of success.

Yeah.

Accomplishment, I think, is a really dangerous one because I feel that's very outcome-focused.

Yeah.

Rather than thinking about perceived competency and potential and self-efficacy and these more sort of process mastery-based ideas about progression.

Yeah, sure. I mean, to be fair, I haven't actually updated my knowledge on that for the last 10 years potentially, you know, it may be that they've revised that whole framework and, you know, and more nuanced understanding, et cetera. So just to caveat that, I don't know, but the point about the negative emotion and the, that the kind of shadow side I read in one of your pieces, you said it also needs to include, so wellbeing also needs to include our ability to hold sorrow, live productively with grief, and find hope in the face of adversity. And that's that sense that those negative, or not even necessarily negative, the way we frame them, right? Yeah. Difficult, uncomfortable. They are a fundamental part of our reality. And if we pretend that they're not there, or we encourage our young people to pretend they're not there, and the only way you can be well is if you're constantly experiencing positive emotion and loads of meaning and loads of accomplishment, it's a hiding to nothing because that's just not the way the kind of the multifaceted aspect of reality works. It has—

Well, the cyclical nature of life works, I say. Yes, absolutely. And I feel that there's a danger in, at best, people think it's okay to not be okay because I can get through this and feel better.

Yeah.

Rather than thinking there's actual value. There might be actual value. You know, if you're like experiencing deep grief, but it's the hardest thing in the world. Yeah, but it's also— there's a value in removing yourself a bit from your world until you sort of start to rebuild and come to terms with that loss and that fracture to your identity. There's a woman called Glynis Breakwell who was the head of my department back in the 1980s when I was studying psychology. He wrote a book called Threatened Identities, which was one of the books that had the biggest impact on my life personally and professionally, and And in that she talks about depression really being all about fractured and threatened identity. And I, I feel that's so true. So when something goes wrong and our identity is threatened or fractured, we need to experience that. We need to know about that. So, you know, our feelings, our emotions, these are messages to guide our behavior in a, in the best way for us.

Absolutely amazing. Yeah. So I mean, we're kind of nudging at the edges of this theory called Contextual Wellbeing, or your, you know, your framing of Contextual Wellbeing, which is your latest book and a kind of a more overarching, you know, description, I suppose, of what we're talking about. So I'd love, I mean, it's a, it's a big, it's a, it's a book's worth. So I'd encourage people to obviously go and dive into the book, but just if you could give a little bit of a sense of, as a synopsis, what is that? And there's the 4 dimensions and perhaps we can dig into some of those a bit more specifically.

Yeah, so when I wrote the book, for a lot of the, the things I've been saying, that was sort of really concerned that as much as I was sort of working with all these amazing people to try and better support wellbeing and improve mental health in schools for young people and staff, yeah, that we were misfiring in all these different ways. We weren't paying attention to the context. And so as someone who's a social psychologist with a more sort of lack of a developed professional interest in the social side of who we are, it felt like I could really offer a contribution to reshift our focus and challenge some of the things that we're doing. So it's a philosophy for understanding well-being from a more socially based point of view, which we sort of touched on, I think. And it's a framework for thinking about how you could then take that philosophy and apply it within a school context. And it seemed to me that the, the helpful thing to do— so it doesn't sound like an overwhelming theory of everything was to divide context into 4 clear domains. Now, these domains are not really 4 clear domains. It's just that that's a sort of useful way to try and manage that and to think about that within your school. So firstly, people, and thinking about the actual relationships we have with each other and with the groups of people in our lives. So for a student, that could be how they identify and relate to their class as a whole, but also to individuals and of course to the teacher. That's very important. And then thinking about policy and practice and how that supports and meets the needs of everyone within the context and, and how we connect and relate to that. And, and you've already touched on that quite a lot with this sort of like competitive outcome-focused policy and practice that we have that's largely set to encourage certain outcomes as seen as ultimate measures of success, at least on the website of schools, if not in the minds and hearts of the people, and also to garner compliance in terms of compliant behaviour. And I feel that the trouble with those aims is they tend to then often work against meeting our needs for self-determination from— taken here from Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's self-determination theory, our needs for autonomy and having some control over our lives for having authentic relationships that don't feel controlling, and for having some sense of perceived competency and mastery, which is more of an ongoing thing rather than outcome-based thing. So policy, practice, social norms— the sort of true guides of human behavior, the, the way we understand just the way the world is and how that meets our needs and supports our values. And then finally, the spaces, the physical spaces we find ourselves in. Which really become places when we add meaning to them and we interpret them. So for an easy example, which I think I put in the book, is if you walk into the reception of your school, what are the messages on the walls within that, in the physical space? Is there community artwork and scrolling screen and people doing stuff together? Or, or is there a trophy cabinet or a board with the sort of engraved with the names of the last head the person, you know. And these things have messages. They tell us, you know, being best is actually the best, and all children are equal but some are more equal than others. Or they tell us that actually it's connection and community that matters here. Yeah, I mean, that's an easy example, but in many ways, in subtle ways, that our physical environment has enormous power. I was actually talking today at lunchtime at a school, a small community school here in Perth, Bull Park Community School, And the principal, Paul, was saying that they just had their open day and a lot of people have come in and said, oh, it just feels so nice here, like such a community, and I can't put my finger on why. And I, I really believe it's because there was greenery everywhere, there was community artwork everywhere, there was so much attention to detail in the physical environment to create a sense of we're inclusive and we're accepting and everyone's Welcome. So things in our physical environment, we often, I think, have added power cuz we pick up on them in such a subconscious way. We just get a feeling or a vibe or, or whatever it might be.

Yeah. So I'd love to, I mean, I'd love to dig into a few different things there, but firstly, maybe to say your kind of warning at the beginning, I think is really well heard and important that we need to describe what we're talking about in a way that people understand. But as soon as you start describing things and separating them into 4 separate domains and somehow You know, you've, you've suddenly removed the complexity from the context, right? And there's, there's a kind of a, I think an important caveat that, that these are not separate, which you've, which you've just said, but I just wanted to kind of reiterate cuz I think that's really important. But then at the same time, we need to be able to talk about something and we need to talk about specifics in order to help people understand.

And in a manageable way as well.

Exactly.

So it's about, yeah, trying to think about how can change and development feel energizing, like growth. 'Cause otherwise I found myself again and again in the early days in this position where, you know, educators would understand what I was trying to say to them, but it sounded all so overwhelmingly hard and they would just think, well, can't we just make the glycerol into the kindness tree? Because we could do that. That's sort of tangible and concrete.

Yeah.

Whereas to, to just sort of stroll in and say, well, it's the whole system that needs to change. Yeah. It's too much.

Absolutely. And I was thinking that as you were talking about the environment of that community school, because, you know, you could conclude from that, that, okay, so greenery and, you know, these different aspects of the physical environment are really important. So we carbon copy those and we translate those into our school over here in a different context. But they won't have necessarily the same, or they, they certainly won't have the same impacts in that new context because of the way that that has been brought about. And I think probably, I mean, imagining that community growing in a way that has created that environment, there's that emphasis on process, which you talk about a lot.

Yeah.

That it's not saying, let's take this set of criteria for the physical space. And just implement them. There's a sense of how did we get to where we are now? And we've, we've gone through a process of understanding our environment or interacting with our environment and, and it's changed and morphed and layered over time.

Yeah.

That I think is really important.

Building that meaning at the same time. Yeah, exactly. Because otherwise you end up as the primary school, he loved the idea of the vegetable garden and now it's just some sort of overgrown wild space that no one ever goes to, you know. And it— yeah, so it's— or you end up with the expansive oval that you're not allowed to do a cartwheel on any longer, you know. So it's sort of— yes, I think there are some sort of basic understandings of the value of things like nature that we can take on board.

Sure.

Some sort of general understanding that nature really counts. And I always say, gosh, at the very least, go and buy a plant for your classroom, and you can buy it from IKEA, it's fine. But yes, you're right, I absolutely agree with you. It's important to, to think as a whole What does this mean to us and how does this relate to who we are and what matters to us? And how can we grow and develop in a way that is meaningful and is going to have the impact that we're looking for rather than be seen to just be ticking the box?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there was the three kind of big concepts that seemed to, or I suppose threads that run through all of your four domains with that idea of process, which we've kind of talked about, but then also cohesion rather than competition, which you've mentioned slightly, but I think is important. And then equity, equity, which I'd love to also ask you about. So that idea of— so we've got process, cohesion, and equity as kind of guiding principles somehow, I don't know, in relation to the contextual wellbeing. Where does the equity point come in for you? How do you connect that?

Well, I think it's simply put, and this is something I was talking about at the IB Global Conference recently in Adelaide. If you look at mental health, like we said at the beginning, in young people, it's really appalling. But if you then sort of start to think, well, who are— is there something specific about that characterizes young people that are particularly vulnerable. Generally speaking, I feel that it's because— and I think research supports this, it's not just a feeling, I should say— that the majority of young people who are vulnerable to poor mental health in the school context have a significant difference, which is rather than just being seen as placing them at a certain end of a continuum of difference places them at the bottom of a hierarchy of difference. So the difference they have is seen as lower status and less valuable than people who are at the other end of what should be a continuum but is actually a hierarchy. And the more that you have differences that place you as lower status and of lower value within your context, your system, your school, then the more excluded you become, the less you have opportunity to feel included and have a sense of belonging. So I feel it's really important that we expand in our discussion of equity to really consider moving beyond thinking about diversity, because this is not just about having lots of different people. And we've got to, to really revisit what it means to be inclusive, because I think that often One, we only focus on popular media topics or things that are in the political view.

Yeah.

And two, we often confuse integration with inclusion, whereas instead we should maybe shifting more to acceptance and how we can allow someone to be who they are and be well educated, as opposed to thinking, oh, we're just going to give them support to become like everybody else. Yeah. And that's sort of like backtracking slightly to that political agenda. Absolutely, there are differences that people have that place them at the lower end of hierarchies that really should be continuums. For example, looking at things like neurodiversity or sexual orientation or learning differences, there are lots I can think of. Yeah, but there's also, I think it may be even a bigger, more powerful sense, there are differences associated with your temperament that are really inequitably approached in schools that are really set up to be like really large factories for example, sensitivity and introversion, extroversion. So right from the moment that you can sort of run around, you are given sort of value labeling according to your differences in temperament. And we tend to sort of see children that are more sensitive or more introverted as being at the lower end of that hierarchy, as opposed to seeing them as having their own value and much to offer the world, and just different to those that are more extroverted less sensitive. And our schools are set up so that we tend to set up all our activities and ways of even assessing kids or grouping kids or teaching kids.

Yeah.

That favor extroversion and a less sensitive approach.

Yeah.

And then we look at the kids that are more introverted or more sensitive and we sort of tell them to toughen up or they have to become more resilient.

Yeah.

Well, maybe they are just actually having to deal with more difficulty. So I think equity needs to be, needs to start addressing other areas and it needs to look a lot more in terms of inclusion and what that means.

Again, there's so many traps, aren't there? There's the kind of outcomes focus of equity of around, you know, well, we've dealt with the integration or inclusion of these categories of people and that's, and we've got our DEIJ policy and we've done all these kind of outcomes-oriented things and therefore we've taken care of that piece. And as you said, and I think again, it's back to that kind of complexity lens and the contextual lens is that there's so much overlaying nuance of the way that people show up to who they are that are way beyond just certain categories that they might be identified within. Yeah. And it's like that again, or that also that trap of back to the individual focus of the positive education stuff. It's like, well, if you've got this set of traits, you're gonna be successful and well, or successful in an education system, right?

Yes.

And you, you know, you see it all the time. I was talking yesterday to a colleague about the Inner Development Goals. I don't know if you've seen those, but you know, we, we are very good at coming up with lists of dispositions or traits that make up the recipe for being successful or well, or whatever that thing is. And it's really dangerous.

I think it's dangerous because it supports the system the way it is and tells people that they need to integrate if they don't fit in, really, as opposed to challenging the system to be more, to be broader, more flexible, more accepting, more inclusive. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. More responsive. And, and that's, I would love to ask you about that because I think back to where we started, there's a sense of focusing on wellbeing as somehow separate from teaching and learning. But what I love about this about your work is that you're really pushing, especially again with this self-determination theory and this idea of, of motivation and engagement, that we need to make some fundamental shifts in the way that we think about pedagogy and curriculum and learning spaces and timetables and all of those kind of structures within school that are not in many people's minds about wellbeing. They're about pedagogy or academics. Yeah. You know, however, however you wanna frame it, but they're about something else. They're not really about wellbeing. But what your contextual wellbeing framing does is pushes those things need to also shift if we're gonna take wellbeing seriously.

Yeah. There, yeah. And I guess that fundamentally relates to how you understand wellbeing, whether you see it as some sort of separate thing about you that in some ways can be rarefied and quantified and assessed on a 10-point scale, or whether you think actually it's a more of a sort of philosophical, less quantifiable way of expressing connection and a positive experience. And so in many ways you could say, just to sort of circle back a bit to that, think about equity and inclusion. It's almost a case of if you fit the system really well, then you're probably going to respond really well to a lot of the positive education ideas because you're connected, you're internalizing the norms of that system.

Yeah.

And so you're going to really be able to enhance all of that with your Mindfulness Mondays and your gratitude lesson and all of that stuff. But if you're feeling low status, excluded, that you don't fit that system, then that is the issue. That is the issue. The system is all of these domains, but it's, it's the way we do things. It's the approach we take. So I suppose I, I, I really believe that in many ways we need to stop focusing so much on wellbeing in schools and instead focus on ensuring that the way a school is operating, that system is meeting the needs of everyone within that school.

Yeah. But a fundamental need that you've recognized that the self-determination aspect is a key feature. And that is, yeah. If, you know, if we're gonna isolate one particular thing that is so lacking from the way that the education system is currently structured. It's self-determination, right?

So it just, you know, yes, yes. So we're not supporting self-determination. So I feel that, and I, I know that Richard Ryan and Edward Deci would agree with this, that, that their theory was initially put together as a theory to help understand autonomous motivation and the factors that, that lead to being a self-determined being. That in many ways, if we are autonomously motivated, that we are doing things because they're intrinsically rewarding, or they might be hard, but they lead to something that we want, that we selected for ourselves. Yeah. So that we are engaged in our life, we're motivated, we're connected. That is wellbeing. That is wellbeing in action. So it makes sense to focus on creating a system system that supports autonomous motivation and self-determination in young people, because that gives them their best opportunity for having the experience of well-being. So rather than focusing on well-being per se, you're focusing on creating a connected social system in which people have the best opportunity to be well in action.

Yeah, no, exactly, because again, we can also get pulled back into the individual focus of, well, just just, you know, come on, just be more self-determined. Come on, just, just you do that. Right. And it's, it, it's an emergent property of the context in a way.

Yes.

That, because people will be self-determined if they are invited to be because of the, yes. As you said, all the, the unsaid messages of what, what's on the walls, what the people are saying, what's possible in that environment.

Yeah, totally. You're in this system where you get those students who are put in the extension or their gifted program or the top stream or made, you know, given the badge of honor or the glitter pen or the prize or the prefect or whatever it is. They're constantly being awarded and rewarded and told, you know, you're successful, you're winning, you're great. And that's sort of like helping them along the way to feel like really competent in what they're doing, to have that sort of need met so that they put more effort in. So they are more motivated and more engaged. And better supported. And then we sort of like look at those kids that are really struggling, that are in the D group. They didn't win anything and they're terrified to swim in the carnival. And we look at them and we say, well, if you put in a bit more effort, exactly, you too could be up there. You know, you just gotta put some effort in or sort of like get a bit tougher, push on through.

Yeah.

And yet the way that they are experiencing their life is is, is, and that's why they're disconnected. Yeah. And if you took those people in the top group and you gave them all that feedback and that context, you know, those conditions, they would be feeling disconnected too.

Absolutely. Yeah. But I think, I mean, that's the paradox of agency as well, isn't it? That going back to Nora Bateson, and I'm sure you'd agree, it's not one or the other because there is a mutual relationship between the kind of individual responses and the environment. It's a dynamic system, right? It's not that that it's nothing to do with the individual and it's all about the context, or it's nothing to do with the context and it's all about the individual. There's a dynamical flux and relationship between those two things.

It's about the spaces between. Absolutely. And yeah, and if a child is sort of unable to regulate their emotions or that they are struggling to make eye contact and smile and say hello, then it's going to be harder to form friendships, isn't it? So it's going to be harder to feel like socially that they've got good connections., and that's their skills and that you can learn over time. Yeah, absolutely. And, and for some they, they come a lot easier than for others. There are things that we can do to support individuals. I absolutely agree with that. But I fear that all of our focus on individuals, like I was saying before, means that we are just sort of like negating to pay attention to 100%.

Yeah. No, yeah, it's a rebalancing that is very necessary, isn't it? So thank you. I mean, I recognise we've gone over time.

It's been great chatting with you. This is so interesting. I could talk all day.

No, I so appreciate you taking the time to chat, and it's really important work.

Thank you. Oh, thank you, Tim Logan. It's a, it's a great podcast, and you've spoken to so many interesting people, so it feels very special to be among them.

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