Towards Wellbeing-Ness as an Experience of Inclusion, Belonging and Voice in a Digital (Post-Covid) World of Global Change

Abstract

This chapter considers what it means to learn and create personal and shared experiences of wellbeing-ness, where inclusion, belonging and finding a voice are defining moments. Only a few years ago this might have been understood in terms such as social and emotional learning (SEL), but now the buzz word globally and especially in a country such as New Zealand is ‘wellbeing’. The challenge is twofold: firstly, how to conceptualise and practice wellbeing-ness in a more digitally informed COVID world, such as through digital storytelling and, secondly, how to assess and put a value on it and, in so doing, show how a taxonomy of the emotions might support an understanding of inclusion.

For many years to come, learning to live with COVID or dreaming of a post-COVID world will be characterised by a key experience. The one that comes to mind is that of collective liminality. The term is familiar in the field of anthropology, where it depicts an in-between zone or state of being, transitioning between the known and familiar, through the open and unpredictable, to a ‘new normal’ with its own set of norms. We find liminality in many places in the transition from carbon-constrained to carbon-free or in the shift from commercial to social imperatives.¹ In the field of sociology this was classically discussed by Durkheim [1] as a state of anomie, when societal norms had weakened or broken down. His view was that it was a source of great anxiety, and we too are aware of how many have felt excluded financially, socially and not least, existentially, from a predictable experience of inclusion, wellbeing and belonging. For some to even have a minimal level of stable digital connectivity remains an issue, while for others, the move from face-to-face or blended face-to-face social interaction to predominantly digital social interaction has been, at times, overwhelming in unforeseen ways. The unpublished poem below by Dobson anticipates the themes in this chapter, where a person’s story is akin to a book:

uncounted yesterdays and tomorrows

would you like to exchange for a human book?

sharing stories wrapped in seaweed

unique first editions time stamped

we live in hope running our finger along

the forget me knot forgotten.

For some writers [2] the wider digital issue is one that pre-dates COVID experiences, namely the disruption it has caused in many walks of life. In education in particular, it is characterised by the move from digitising (e.g. the pen and paper version to copying it in a digital equivalent) to digitalising (e.g. the pen and paper version is re-contextualised in a different, multimodal version). The last mentioned is most clearly seen in the move to using computer-adaptive teaching and learning with personalised feedback and assessment based upon the individual’s constantly changing level of attainment. This relies upon computer algorithms that have been written to offer numerous branches or levels for students to follow as their knowledge and skills develop. Of course, it could be argued that it is almost impossible to write such algorithms able to capture all the possible permutations of personalised learning. Yet the Australian online national assessment program ‘is now a tailored test that adapts to student responses, presenting students with questions that may be more or less difficult—resulting in better assessment and more precise results.’² However, Hogan and Sellar [3] have warned that if this approach spreads to all areas of education we might increasingly face a situation where teachers require fewer qualifications and teacher registration bodies set fewer qualification standards. Such de-professionalisation is a spectre faced in many other occupations as artificial intelligence (AI) makes inroads.

On a more positive note, McCallum et al. [4] suggest that while the digital has resulted in disruption to traditional teaching and learning, it is important to focus on how students have started to learn not in spite of digital distractions, but because of them. As they put it:

One of the constant challenges in education is keeping the learner engaged, motivated and connected in a world increasingly filled with distractions. Social media, streaming TV and video games all compete for students’ increasingly fragmented attention.

Inspired by the video games, it is clear that learning can be fun and another important element of an experience that deserves closer examination, that is, −flow” [5]. Gamers (athletes, too) experience this flow state when totally engaged in the game. Living in the moment and the experience, the activity is effortless and there is no sense of time passing.

Students can also experience flow, and this is when learning is at its most productive. So, the challenge is to plan and deliver online education so that this level of engagement is attained and (hopefully) encountered on a regular basis. The key lies in the definition of distraction. Screen learning must involve distracting students towards the things that really matter. In education, as in gaming, rather than admonishing learners for not focusing when sitting at desks in school or in front of screens, we should work within our distracted world. We need to play with distraction, work with distraction and learn with distraction. Paradoxically, distraction may not be the enemy, it could be the gateway to more attentive learning.

Concerning liminality, Pendergast and Dobson [6] similarly highlighted how its experience was apparent for youth who are particularly vulnerable when their rites of passage, daily routines, milestones and traditions were repeatedly disrupted, postponed or cancelled by COVID. Such experiences are crucial personal and collective cultural markers for ongoing wellbeing. The point raised was that youth faced the loss of important and valued shared stories to remember in the years to come. They would as a consequence, risk feeling more excluded than included in society. Pendergast and Dobson suggested this might even have an effect on their brains. In their words:

The adolescent years, known as the second sensitive period of brain development, are important because this is when shaping of the brain occurs in earnest, in response to the unique environmental experiences of the individual [7].

This process of synaptic pruning, which starts with the onset of puberty and continues for at least the next 5 years results in unused connections being removed, while those that are used are strengthened and “hard wired” with a coating of a substance called myelin.

Memory and processing are enhanced and there is a heightened vulnerability to risk-taking and sensitivity to mental illness because of the intense brain shaping under way. The spectre looms of brains shaped by unmet expectations, disrupted routines, missed significant events, ongoing anxiety, fear and stress about what may be ahead the next day, week, month or year. Neuroscience points to such experiences as paving the way for lifelong reduced outcomes, such as poorer health, lowered educational achievement and the loss of optimism, hope and wellbeing [8].

In connecting with the concept of liminality—the transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar—with unmet expectations, the potential for storytelling to harness a new kind of story emerges from within the liminal space to offer a possible panacea to aid healing and create optimism for the future. This book is about exactly this power of stories, the skills to tell them and how this can create a foundation to support cultures of inclusion and experiences of belonging and wellbeing.

In other chapters authors explore in more detail how our individual narratives tell of the personal, the family and eventually contribute to collective memory when they are not erlebniss (lived empty time of repetitive experiences (e.g waiting for the daily bus), but erfahrung of non-repeatable or transformational experiences (e.g. a birth in the family or an accident) [9]. The art of telling and engaging in storytelling allows us to experience humanity. Stories are fundamental to our growth and empathy, building resilience and wellbeing, and serving as catharsis and release. There are many different kinds of stories: stories of traditions; place-based stories; those that focus on respect for different world-views and diversity; trauma and catastrophe stories, when we are challenged by events and crises; stories of health and illness, love and loss, hope and joy, of care and carelessness; personal stories of trauma; stories of uncertainty and dilemmas; community stories that enable collective remembering and global planetry stories to save earth in a time of pollution and carbonisation.

We are reminded of the famous and yet often forgotten dialogue between two imaginary refugees who meet in Europe in WWII. They had a series of conversations. The creator of these characters was Bertolt Brecht [10], whose work was published in 1956 in German and not in an English translation until 2019:

“You could say: disorder is when nothing is in the right place.

Whereas order is when the right place has nothing at all.”

“These days, you tend to find order where there isn’t anything.

It’s a symptom of deprivation.

For Brecht, refugees in flight lived in a world where all meaning has been emptied or, more correctly, all the meaning to which they had been accustomed was discounted, lost and abandoned. Quite simply, all around them was the lived experience and space of the liminal. In these conversations Brecht created a safe place, where the two refugees and the readers could feel at ease, looking forward to each new episode in these conversations, even though the world around was unstable. In a strange turn of events Brecht seems to rescue us from the abyss of meaninglessness, offering us a sense of well-being, even if it is of a fleeting character resting in the form and content of these conversations. The stories of refugees are not owned by a single person. They connect with stories of nomads, wanderers and migrants. But they also connect with inhabitants who are sedentary as they too search for stability and meaning where there appears to be none.

There are also many ways of telling stories that have developed over centuries ranging from the oral tradition and including novels, plays, opera, painting, sculpture, photography, film and, toward the end of the twentieth century, digital stories.

In what follows, we shall look at the experience of COVID in our digital world, the shocks it created and how it continues to threaten inclusion and belonging for so many. Thereafter, we will ask how we might understand and conceptualise wellbeing. Finally, we will move to ask and answer the question, how can we measure well-being in a digital world? A key argument will be that it is not enough to identify indicators of well-being. Even though this is important, we must also look to wellbeing as an experience, what we choose to call wellbeing-ness. The skills and experience of digital storytelling are an important way of disseminating experiences of wellbeing-ness. This will be taken up in more detail in other chapters in this book.

1 The Shock of Exclusion and Non-belonging

Let us begin with the example of Norway, which on one level is a country not too dissimilar to other countries in terms of the effects of COVID changing the way they have lived. On another level, three events have provided shocks to education in particular, and in more general terms to the personal and shared wellbeing of the population in and outside school settings.

In the early 2000s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests arrived and it became an international yearly exercise to chastise or praise teachers and students for their performance in the use of reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. Norway discovered it was not cleverer than all its neighbours and that Finland was the global front runner in this respect. As Sahlberg [11] has commented, Finnish education has been characterised by some key ideas in addition to the collective raising of professional skills amongst all teachers. Namely:

Regular recess and physical exercise are crucial for substantial learning. Small data can often be more effective than big data for achieving big changes. Enhancing equity is an essential component of improving quality of education outcomes.

From the turn of the century the ritual of praising or chastising teachers and students for their performance began in earnest in Norway, but also across the world when new results were released. For some teachers and students, the announcements denoted moments when they felt that they were no longer included in society or the education system. Put differently, as teachers they felt abandoned and let down by some politicians, policy makers and parents, with a continual pressure to perform better. For students there was the feeling that they were in some way letting down their teachers and also their parents.

The image below (Fig. 1) appeared in a national daily in Norway (30.11.16), the teacher saying, ‘knowledge is power’ and the caption to the cartoon was ‘Help! Now our children are smarter than us.’³ The reason was that Norwegian children were outperforming other children in the Nordic countries in mathematics.

Fig. 1

Newpaper cartoon in Norwegian daily. The text reads Knowledge is Power (Kunnskap er makt)

The second shock occurred on the 22nd of July 2011. 77 youth and adults were killed when a Norwegian undertook a terrible massacre on a single summer afternoon. The then Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said the following, ‘it was one Norway before and one after the 22nd of July.’ All in the country were included in the shared feeling of sorrow after the event. There was not a sense of exclusion and non-belonging. It was the opposite, and all felt touched. In the months that followed the missed opportunities to slow and stop the attacker on that tragic day were considered and publicly debated. The immediate sense of an overwhelmingly inclusive sorrow and collective belonging could not last. It was not that Norwegians felt they did not include all, it was more that the intensity of the emotion of total inclusion could not be sustained.

Other emotions surfaced, such as disappointment and even ressentiment⁴ that the perpetrator had not been caught before the event. Moreover, Norwegians needed to understand how one of their own had committed these terrible acts. Seierstad’s [13] One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway looked to the perpetrator’s upbringing, self-isolation and his gradual movement to the dark side of the web. He suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder and a mixture of self-rage and pity.

It is worth recalling how Sartre [14] famously described a dialectical process where a group can move in pendulum fashion between a serial group entity (individuals regarding themselves as individuals in competition with others) to a group as collective (group-in-fusion) and the reverse. For him the key factor in forming the group as a collective group was an external threat to the group that unified and strengthened their shared sense of purpose and equality. The evidence he identified was not psychological tests or experiments, but an understanding of history and the French Revolution. The revolutionaries were able to collectively act as a group-in-fusion facing a shared outer-threat—as a result they stormed the Bastille. However, in the following years this sense of group we-ness broke down and members of the group began to fear and mistrust each other. We must be careful; Norwegians did not mistrust each other in the sense implied by Sartre. Yet, it is worth noting the strength of an overwhelming inclusive sense and emotion of inclusion is difficult to sustain. We will return to the point on trust in due course.

In the philosophical tugs and pulls between Sartre and his one-time close friend Merleau-Ponty we find this understanding of we-ness and inclusion is played out differently. The early work of Sartre in his novels and Being and Nothingness (1984) [15] struggles with the existential understanding of motivation and that it is to be measured and assessed by the individual and all they are worth. In his later work on dialectical reason and revolutions he talks of the moments of collective we-ness that intersperse what is fundamentally still the fall back to the responsibility of the individual to make choices and assessments about historical and equally important daily moments and how to act in a manner true to oneself. In other words, throughout the work of Sartre there is a tacit understanding that motivation is ultimately a question for the individual and to what extent they are or are not motivated by the ways or external threats faced by the group.

Merleau-Ponty’s view is different. Our motivations and sense of connected inclusion is paramount and always to be experienced through our bodies and how they position us with and through others to undertake actions, use language and make assessments and evaluations. Merleau-Ponty [16] introduced the term chiasm and by this he meant the shared inter-corporeal space of bodies, signs (signifier, signified) and history working together and giving rise to corporeal experiences of touched-touching, seen-seeing, speaking-spoken to, feeling-felt and so on. A good example of this is the handshake or the conversation. In the former, who is touching and who touched is indivisible. So too in a conversation, where the moment of speaking is indivisible with respect to listening, as the speaker also listens to their own voice and listens to how they are heard and received by the other.

With Merleau-Ponty’s approach in mind we arrive at the view that understanding the individual, in this case Norwegians, is inevitably inter-woven with others and the group; in what is a web of inter-connectedness. We are anticipating what will be a central point later in this chapter. Namely, that inclusion and wellbeing are as much corporeal and emotional experiences of connection, as they are the result of an individual’s learning and acting to support civic and community obligations founded upon a reasoned rationality for civic participation and belonging. Lockdown [17] is a digital story created by a Norwegian citizen that touches on all these dimensions of the individual, including that of civic trust: https://www.patientvoices.org.uk/flv/1288pv384.htm

We have looked at two shocks, one in education and one in society. Now we can move to consider one more closely related to the topic of this book. In 2020 the shock of COVID reached Norway and the world. Nobody escaped what appeared to be its largely invisible hand. On one level, all were included in its reach, despite the way in which it was expressed in different ways: health systems differed in their ability to meet the needs of those affected; not all could earn a wage when many companies or businesses had to close temporarily or permanently; and schools, universities and early childhood kindergarten had to learn to teach online or at a distance for weeks or months on end. People were differentially affected based upon age, socio-economic background, cultural background. access to stable Internet and so on.

Moreover, in Norway and other Scandinavian countries there was another shock connected with COVID. Namely, the erosion of generalised trust whereby all could previously take it as given that society and the welfare state would look after all equally well and all would feel included and experience a shared sense of belonging in the country. This is the sense that an individual belongs to a moral community of like-minded others:

It is a general outlook on human nature and mostly [emphasis in the original] does not depend on personal experiences or upon the assumption that others are trustworthy” [18].

Acknowledging that it is a complex debate as regards measuring generalised trust [19], the point we are making here is that COVID threatened our sense of what it means to belong to a moral community based upon shared trust in particular strangers or people we do not know. Sweden adopted fewer lockdowns than its neighbours and generalised trust was arguably weakened to a greater degree. Throughout the world the level of generalised trust was weakened in general. Political and policy debates about how to rebuild this trust was connected with those reluctant to take vaccines for different reasons and the need to reopen the domestic and international economies to generate sorely needed revenue, employment and a sense of wellbeing.

Globally COVID was the source of shocks as all attempted to maintain and/or build cultures of wellbeing characterised by inclusion and belonging. In education in particular many children did not have access to normal face-to-face learning and teachers had to develop online teaching skills and approaches, while educational authorities similarly had to scramble to create resources. There was great anxiety that not all children had equal access to good teaching, reliable internet or educational resources adapted to online delivery. As Warburton et al. [20] highlighted, developing engaging online teaching is a key imperative so students remain motivated and do not become digital bystanders.

(...) we can start to identify a series of approaches on a spectrum from simple technological substitution to more radical redefinitions of teaching. In this model of substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition,⁵ we tend to find many educators remain firmly rooted in using technology to replace what they already do in the classroom. As a result, the human essence of the teaching experience is lost when mediated⁶ via a digital interface...An example here might be the distribution of electronic class notes to replace the course textbook. The result is a learning setting that’s clunky compared to the day-to-day user experience of the internet.

We need to ‘design for the online’ as Stone [21] has argued. This means to change existing situations into preferred ones. Even though there is no global template for designing for online learning, it can no longer be the sole responsibility of the teacher or the online designer working in the resource division of a ministry of education. Instead, each time we come together—the teacher, student, technologist—we form a new community with a shared discourse. This suggests a reflective and democratic space that allows us to act with consideration and respect for the skills and knowledge of others. We must consider the skills, insights and needs offered by each. The end goal is a seamless and frictionless user experiences of a social internet. In summary, the educational endeavour in a COVID world would in a normative sense be inclusive of all parties. Some might even say it must be user friendly to parents who are, willingly or unwillingly, required to take on the role of home teachers for their children who cannot attend school for long periods.

Involving students and seeking to listen to their views on learning must not be taken to mean giving them total freedom to learn as they wish. Such a policy can actually lead to many not actually learning and the generation of inequalities and lower inclusion in learning. Well before the arrival of digital learning and the situation of today with many having experienced classroom learning via a digital screen and a teacher at a distance, there are lessons from earlier times on this point. Let us turn once again to Norway for a lesson in the risks of freedom to learn policies.

In 1994, Norway launched an educational policy entitled Reform94 [22]. The goal was to give teenage students more control of their own learning. The policy focused on providing students with regular time for self-directed learning. The national evaluation [23] found that while stronger students had sufficient inner motivation, those needing more support were not well-equipped to control their own learning and manage their own motivation.

Policies such as these are not just a thing of the past. Indonesia, in an attempt to break with an education system known for rote learning from 2019 onwards has introduced a suite of policies known as “Merdeka Belajar” movement, or “Freedom to Learn” [24]. As an example, Sekolah Penggerak (Initiator Schools) are encouraged to collaborate with schools and teachers to promote progressive learning practices and a customisation of students’ experiences, instead of learning everything by sheer memorisation. The spectre of Norway’s experience looms in the shadows as a warning, exacerbated by COVID teaching and learning at a distance. Many Indonesian teachers have had limited training in giving students full learning responsibilities within a normal classroom, never mind in an online environment. They found it even more challenging to assess whether students have been learning.

In summary, the argument we are making is that Norway, like many other countries, has experienced a number of shocks in recent history. The last one is COVID-related and, for education, this meant the fear that students would not learn as much as students prior to COVID. The phrase coined to encapsulate the educational shocks has been learning loss. Even though the term learning loss is somewhat challenging linguistically (− you have to normally have had something before you can lose it), Engzell et al. [25] contend ‘learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes.’ In other words, the disadvantaged from before are further disadvantaged because their internet was less reliable, they had fewer home devices to access learning resources, and parents were not as well-prepared or experienced to support child learning.

In the next section, we will consider how to conceptualise well-being with a particular focus on what it means for inclusion and belonging. In other chapters in this book, we contend that a key component is that of growing digital story telling skills to offer students and teachers a tool to reflect upon and make meaning of their learning experiences. To avoid repetition, we will not cover the importance of storying other than to cite Benjamin’s [26] comment, which in our view still rings true in many senses, even though he was talking of the shock of the World War I and we are talking of the shock of COVID:

At the end of the war men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience.

2 Conceptualising Wellbeing Characterised by Inclusion and Belonging

If we ask the reader to reflect for a moment on how they understand wellbeing, they might highlight it in personal terms, professional terms connected with work or even in social terms connected with family and friends. If we look at how it is understood in the world of schooling the terminology we often come across is social and emotional learning. Teachers might teach students about it in mandatory health programs for teenagers in schools.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) as a concept has been around for some years. Some trace it to the 1960s and the founding of the Comer School Development Program, where low socio-economic elementary schools in New Haven, Connecticut trialed and adopted a focus upon meeting the social and emotional needs of predominantly low socio-economic students. Today resources in SEL are collected in CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)⁷ with five key focal points: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making.

Schools can use this framework to direct their practice and policy on anti-bullying, (excessive) digital game play, temperaments, friendships, relationships at home or in the surrounding home environment. Social and emotional experiences of the individual students are targeted and how these might impact on a sense of belonging, inclusion and finding a voice. As an example, consider how anti-bullying might draw implicitly or explicitly upon social and emotional learning so that not only the perpetrators or victim(s) of bullying, but also those who witness it as spectators can be encouraged to demonstrate responsible decision making and intervene. When this occurs peer bystanders are encouraged to find their voice and make a stand for inclusion and belonging. Originating in Finland the successful and increasingly global KiVa⁸ project has highlighted this [27, 28]. Returning to an earlier point, the goal is to create a sense of we-ness (group-in-fusion) or acknowledgement of the chiasm of membership in an interwoven social collective recognising others as valid members.

The same principles are at work in cyberbullying when perpetrators ensure that bystanders are able to view their attempt to attack others. If those viewing intervene and refuse the peer bystander role responsible decision making has been actioned and the other components of the CASEL framework are brought into play: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills. Of course, the challenge in cyberbullying is that a teacher is not always present to resist and stop it. Other forms of bystander intervention are required, such as the owners of the digital platform working with national/international regulatory bodies. President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, in the wake of atrocities in both of their countries, rallied others in an effort to stamp out online hate content circulating through social media algorithms. Ardern has commented:

“The existence of algorithms themselves is not necessarily the problem, it’s whether or not they are being ethically used,” she said, adding that tech companies had shown a real desire to use algorithms for “positive interventions.⁹

So what is the connection between social and emotional learning and wellbeing, when the latter is the buzz word (of the moment)? Is it simply the case of ‘old wine in a new bottle’ and that they are basically the same? At a first glance this might seem to be the case, with the accompanying assertion that media, academia and policy makers have found a new way of recirculating the same old content. Alternatively, could it be that there is a causal connection, such that social and emotional learning is the causal driver towards well-being as the end point? There is no simple answer and it is clearly the case that it is a contested space worthy of discussion and how it might lead to actions.

A good colleague of one of the authors, Dr. Graham Stoop, has proposed in conversation¹⁰ a useful way of understanding a distinction between the two: social and emotional learning can be taught in schools, as evidenced by the work of the US based CASEL group. It takes time and requires a process. On the other hand, wellbeing can usefully be considered as a snapshot of how we are doing in the process. Stoop’s point is thus summarised: SEL is a process and well-being is a measure for which methodologies and indicators can be developed. We shall consider the measurement aspect of well-being later in this chapter and wish to add that much can also be gained by contending that well-being is very much a form of experience, even if it is a snapshot.

Within this experience there is also an existential aspect and we want to turn to Heidegger for a moment to gain some insights. According to Heidegger [29], emotions reveal the existential state of a person and for us in this context it is an existential feeling of wellbeing. For Heidegger the existential state is imminent in concrete, lived everyday existence, what he termed the ontic, the that-which-is of entities, das Seiende in German, and usually translated simply as ‘being’. The existential refers to how a person lives the ontic in a certain manner (e.g how wellbeing is lived as a burden, joy or in some other manner). Heidegger called this Being (das Sein), as it referred to the Being of being (das Seiende).

To gain access to it, one could ask, ‘how one is, and how one is faring?’ and listen to the respondent’s tone, as an emotional mood colouring the reply [29]. If the candidate is nervous and shaky in their voice it indicates an existential Being of angst and uncertainty. The challenge in making use of Heidegger’s existential (psychoanalytic) analysis is that it reveals only the existential state of the person in phenomenological fashion, and says nothing of the ethical quality of the existential experience, before, during or after it takes place. In our context we are interested in the manner in which the experience of wellbeing is lived existentially. The ethical component we have already touched upon in our comments about generalised trust of the other and the extent to which it is present or lacking.

To reiterate, wellbeing in our view can be captured by the term wellbeing-ness, a term we have coined deliberately by adding ‘ness’ to highlight the experiential, along with the existential component of the experience. In the reminder of this section, we will briefly present the work of Diener (2018) who over several years patiently developed an evidence-based conception of wellbeing. His understanding offers purchase to our conception of wellbeing-ness as an experience with existential implications and connections to a sense of inclusion characterised by belonging and voice.

A number of publications [30, 31] note that it is customary to consider wellbeing as economic capital (e.g. the amount of man-made assets possessed by an individual or group). It can also be understood as natural capital (e.g. the amount and character of natural environment available to the individual or group), human capital (e.g. the totality of skills held by the individual or group) and social capital (e.g. the networks of collaboration with others). We have measures of these forms of capital in terms of wealth and property, levels of uncultivated land, the levels of schooling and vocational and other qualification attained. Measures of collaboration collected in algorithms demonstrating our interactions on different platforms such has Facebook and so on - even if not publicly available.

The trend has been to move beyond solely these capital-based concepts and measures, to consider well-being as ‘capabilities’ (opportunities with respect to functioning) and how they might be less congruent with the prosperity of a nation and its collective values, especially when individualistic identity is in the ascendant [32]. With this as his point of departure, Diener has sought to expand the understanding of wellbeing to include psychological and non-capital components. The suggestion has been made that it contributes to our understanding of health and longevity [33]. Figure 2 is inspired by Diener’s much cited work [34] and represents a tripartite understanding of the individual’s subjective wellbeing.

Fig. 2

Subjective wellbeing inspired by Diener [34]

Considering this trend towards wellbeing as a subjective experience with existential import, what we have called wellbeing-ness, our view is that in Covid times it was characterised by three inter-related characteristics.

Firstly, in a positive sense, it involves generalised trust of those we do not personally know. This might be in COVID reminiscent terms, members of the health service with whom we come into contact. In a negative sense, it will be the opposite where the level of generalised trust is in decline. This will rarely apply to workers in the healthcare profession; it might apply to those who are policy makers or politicians who lose their support the longer COVID negatively impacts life and wellbeing e.g. creating a greater sense of isolation and feeling excluded from physical, face-to-face social interaction and consultations.

Secondly, wellbeing-ness is in a positive sense related to the manner in which the sense of liminality and in-between is overcome. This might entail re-establishing new connection and the digital affords new forms of connectivism ,¹¹ even if it is through digital media and teachers, like other professionals (e.g. doctors, youth workers) work through participation on such platforms—platforms where they would have previously been less present. As Dobson and Schofield [35] put it when considering the new demands planned on learning and teaching in COVID times:

“If connectivism is the theory, a slogan to action online learning and teaching will be: keep it simple, coordinated (with others in larger or smaller networks) and normal, so we can still feel security in ‘know this’, ‘know how’, ‘know where’ and ‘know how it feels’.”

The establishment of predictable routines, and not necessarily the same routines as before, becomes an important imperative.

Upon such a foundation, the third characteristic is the opportunity to grow mutual recognition and respect between, in the case of learning, the teacher and the students. Without this, teaching becomes less conducive to learning and feedback to the teacher and in the reverse, from the teacher to the students, becomes blocked by social interaction and trust concerns [36]. It is more likely that emotions of mistrust take the focus away from investing in teaching and learning among the involved parties.

This reminds of when Dobson was a community  worker for refugees undertaking home visits to newly arrived refugees after they had left reception centres and were allocated housing in a local municipality. When he entered a home, the atmosphere it evoked reflected how the refugee family was doing. In Heidegger’s term: ‘how one is, and how one is faring?’ Sometimes it was a sense of calm and sometimes the reverse. When it was the latter, a feeling of anxiety, lack of routines and lingering liminality were still evident. Their adjustment to the new country and a new way of Being being had yet to emerge expressing a sense of inclusion, belonging and an accompanying voice to express it. Re-quoting the earlier point: the existential refers to how a person lives the ontic (the concrete of everyday life) in a certain manner (e.g how wellbeing is lived as a burden, a joy or in some other manner). Heidegger called this Being (das Sein), as it referred to the Being of being (das Seiende).

3 Wellbeing as an Indicator or Experience of Wellbeing-Ness

We might pose the question in the following terms: do we measure what we value, or only value what we are able to measure? The answer is dependent on how wellbeing as a construct is understood and then measured. If the construct of wellbeing is understood in terms of different forms of capital, often gathered at a macro level, then we have a number of already existing surveys and already collected administrative data with accompanying indicators to hand. When we consider affective capital, defined by Yoshida and Sue Nichols [37] as a person’s emotional resources and feelings about self and others, we begin to envisage the need for qualitatively different ways of understanding wellbeing.

When the construct of wellbeing is understood in experiential and existential terms we have already directed attention to, following Heidegger’s ontological ontology, how this might be measured in terms of moods [38]. This is not easily measured in terms of surveys that seek to numerically quantify measures of wellbeing. Our moods can change quickly and on the day of the survey it might be a warm and summer and we are on vacation. Our next day may evoke a different set of moods and we are less inclined to feel we are included, belong and a voice to express ourselves.

With the first mentioned in mind let us consider the example of New Zealand. It has looked to survey-based data. But this is a work in progress. They may well become more wellbeing-ness oriented in the future with the support of technology that might provide those immediate snapshots, as Dobson’s colleague Stopp suggested above.

In the New Zealand government’s work to develop a Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy [39] a number of demanding challenges were identified including: the highest suicide rate for young people aged 15–19 years when compared to other countries, disparities in access to education and health services for Māori and Pacific children and their families; and the disproportionate number of Māori and Pacific People in poverty and material hardship. The UNICEF Report card no.16 [42] ranked New Zealand 35 of 38 on scores regarding child mental wellbeing, physical health and skills.

Turning to local and international indicators a scan was undertaken by the Government (Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy 2019):

We found that there are common measures that are often used to measure children’s wellbeing. These include indicators like birth weight, suicide rates, mortality rates, immunisation rates, teenage pregnancy rates, obesity rates, physical activity levels, income levels, housing conditions and educational attainment…The more common measures often have an emphasis on physical health, material wellbeing and educational attainment. Other aspects of outcomes in the Strategy, such as mental wellbeing, loving and nurturing homes, and culture and identity are less commonly captured in existing wellbeing frameworks.

Importantly, they noted that much existing data posits a deficit, rather than strength-based approach e.g. focusing on the ‘presence or absence of harm or poor outcomes, rather than the presence or absence of wellbeing or desired outcomes.’ With this background the government consulted widely with children and youth to develop a set of indicators to address these challenges where the criteria for each indicator was that where possible it should be:

• Statistically robust

• Regularly collected,

• Strengths based,

• Non-specific (that is, broadly informative),

• Relevant and easily understood, applicable to all children and young people,

• Internationally comparable,

• culturally responsive.

So, what kinds of indicators were developed? The Government in its Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy (2019) [40] landed upon 6 main outcomes and clusters of indicators for each of these outcomes. They are illustrated below in Fig. 3. Of note, is the way they bridge the mental, physical, social areas, along with socio-economic disparities, such has poverty.

Fig. 3

Outcomes and indicators of child and youth wellbeing

They all fit within the larger wellbeing framework with inclusion (‘loved, safe and nurtured’), belonging (‘accepted, respected and connected’) and voice (‘involved and empowered’) as central.

The measures identified to reach these outcomes and indicators are extracted from a number of existing surveys. To take an example, the involved and empowered outcome looks to evidence from the Youth Health and Wellbeing Survey—What-About-Me?¹²; existing administrative data and the NZ Health Survey.¹³ This survey approach to indicators leaves the reader wondering if it gains deep and rich enough access to the experience of wellbeing understood as wellbeing-ness. With this in mind let us turn to a different approach to measurement and indicators of wellbeing.

But first, let us look at a digital storytelling project designed to collect digital stories created by young people affected by several serious long-term conditions and their parents. The conditions in question are: severe multi-system allergies, sickle cell disease, Type 1 Diabetes, epilepsy and ulcerative colitis. The stories can be seen here: https://www.patientvoices.org.uk/terrificteens.htm

A qualitative study of the first workshop, consisting of young people with multi-system allergic disease and their parents (Boyd et al., In press) [41] reveals the significance of sharing stories with others. The young people, who faced bullying and worse in their normal school lives, were able to share stories of their common experience, as were their parents. The bonds formed during the workshop, held in 2016, have continued to the present day, with the young people and their parents meeting up on a regular basis—face-to-face when this has been possible and virtually during the pandemic. When interviewed recently for another research project, parents and young people described the therapeutic benefits of sharing their stories and, of equal importance, of establishing a close-knit community where experiences could continue to be shared in an atmosphere of trust and openness. The storytellers who were interviewed spoke of increased wellbeing—or wellbeing-ness—that has been sustained during the intervening years.

One of the main propositions in this book is that storytelling and digital storytelling in particular provide access to meaning and a subjective sense of inclusion, belonging and voice. As stated already, the contention is that stories are fundamental to our growth and empathy, building resilience and wellbeing, and serving as catharsis. They offer shared markers in time and experience of shared social belonging; evoking and communicating the experience of wellbeing-ness. They provide access to the existential emotions of the storyteller and can also touch our own existential emotions as reader or listener. The story can be a long, short, visual, digital, corporeal (a dance) or even a poem.

Here is an example of the last mentioned; a poem written by Dobson that has not been published previously. It considers the Treaty of Waitangi [43]. The Treaty signed in 1840 is the founding document of modern New Zealand, much like the written Constitutions we find in other countries defining rights and principles and who is included and in what manner. Some years after its signing there were violent conflicts between the signatories, over 500 Māori chiefs representing the Māori Iwi (tribes) who are the First Peoples of the country and the settlers represented by the British Crown. To this day this Treaty is lived out in the different personal and shared stories for Māori and the many waves of subsequent settlers who expanded to include those who were not just British in origin.

The poem entitled green gives voice to a sense of wellbeing-ness concerning the encounter then and now between Māori and settler; the author as a recent migrant to the country. A second untitled and also unpublished poem is included by Dobson’s colleague Pine Southon, Hautohu Matua (Principal Māori Adviser) in the Faculty of Education where he worked. Pine responds, much as in a conversation to reading the first poem and her poem uses the word for a tradtional tattoo on the face—Tā moko. See Fig. 4 for an example.¹⁴

Fig. 4

Image published in the New Zealand newspaper Otago Daily Times

green

calligraphy mark the day

contracts spoken written laying down dusted

of each spring bed the eye to rest

predator fences with no name and weasels will find a way

always the way

of summer burn green of every spring

our way a lazy cinema Saturday

a fjord beckon and refuse

high as low as deep

eye to rest

a forest floor

a door

charcoal sketch the afternoon shadow

shaden the grab of history

it burn

Notes to Poem

shaden—Dobson’s word for to shade and shadow, but not to forget.

Tā moko etched on your face.

The words of your ancestors are remembered by the wind.

Your dreams and aspirations are echoes of the past.

That taniwha within recalls what the wind has spoken.

Your strength, your fragility will be its own undoing.

Tomorrow just a breathe away.

The past just spoken and remembered.

A tree bends in agreement with the wind.

Whispered as shouted as silenced.

Papatūānuku forever the afternoon shadow.

Ranginui shaden of what was, what could be.

Notes to Poem

Tā moko—the permanent marking or “tattoo” as traditionally practiced then and today by Māori on their faces.

Taniwha—those challenges, barriers, demons within you.

Whispered as shouted as silenced I likened to your high as low as deep.

Papatūānuku—in Māori tradition the earth mother—my landscape, my sketch, my picture, = shadow = hidden space/place.

Ranginui—in Māori tradition the sky father in the creation story of the world.

The emotions as indicators and measures of wellbeing, belonging and voice that are evoked in these poems will vary according to the readers. For some the emotions will be anxiety and sorrow as they are reminded of difficult and at times warring relationship between Māori and settlers. For others it might be a sense of relief that the intensity of these conflicts has passed. Through storytelling expressed in poems such has these, we approach the experiential and existential understanding of wellbeing-ness, or perhaps more correctly put, it offers a complement to the quantifiable indicators of wellbeing often found at the macro, policy level. Most importantly we can seek and obtain a sense of connectedness with others, an emotion of winclusion and belonging along with voice is evident.

4 Conclusion

Wellbeing has moved from an overwhelming focus upon social and emotional learning to a contested space between those advocating on the one hand, the conception and measurement of wellbeing using survey-based indicators of wellbeing, to support macro-policy goals. On the other hand, there are those who understand it as an experience, and understanding of this with what we have chosen to call wellbeing-ness. This is to focus upon the experiential and existential characteristics of well-being and Diener’s research on subjective wellbeing moves in this direction.

In this chapter, two ways have been proposed to gain access to wellbeing-ness. One by adopting the existential ontology proposed by Heidegger, highlighting what is basically a taxonomy of the emotions.

Heidegger [29] provides the example of real boredom and in our context, this is a signifier of low or negative wellbeing. It is not the reading of a book that one finds not totally enthralling. When really bored we are not bored with a particular thing or activity, and drift ‘hither and thither in the abysses of existence’. An example would be students who throw their hands up in boredom in a COIVD world not because a single experience such as digital schooling is too boring, but because they are bored and fail to be motivated by any of their schooling or extra curricula school pursuits. Heidegger also suggests how the sense of dread, which in our context might refer to an anxiety concerning the future of wellbeing, can be a general feeling of the uncanny (unheimlich)—not being at home with any particular thing—as the what-is refuses to remain and disappears and we lose our sense of self in an overwhelming experience of liminality. As it disappears, we become aware of the totality of our existence as lacking a sustained sense of wellbeing.

Some have even gone as far as to propose a taxonomy of the emotions [44]. It is reproduced below in an adapted version in Table 1 below:

Table 1 A taxonomy of the emotions (adapted from [44])

The second approach to gaining access to wellbeing-ness has been through storytelling which opens the window to connecting with and including others so we experience a shared sense of belonging and access to the storytellers voice, not only as if it were our own but also because we colour the experience of the story with our own experiences as the viewer or the listener. It is of course not that simple; the risk is that well-meaning inclusion might also result in exclusion and a total experience of inclusive exclusion [45]. For example, a person or group can be included in one area or activity, only to be excluded in another. A member of society with formal qualifications might be excluded from entering the labour market because of the colour of their skin.

Measuring wellbeing or wellbeing-ness, the latter the preferred term proposed in this chapter remains a contested space. Theoretically and in an applied sense, there are those in academia and policy who would make the argument for social and emotional learning as indicative of wellbeing and there are of course good arguments to support this. In this chapter we have argued that wellbeing is more the snapshot identifying and measuring how social and emotional learning is progressing over time. It is not the case of choosing one or the other or the view that they are identical and merely old wine in new bottles.