Health and Well-Being in Education: CEDER Journal 2025 Proposal Narrative
by Dr. Collin Webster
Throughout the lifespan, health and well-being converge with human potential. Opportunity, ambition, resolve, and renewal—all essential to pursuing and attaining goals—strengthen or weaken at the hands of health and well-being. This principle reveals itself with distinctive clarity in educational contexts. We could easily intuit that a child who is healthy and well attends school regularly, which increases her chances of academic proficiency. Her motivation to learn is thus piqued, and she persists in her effort to achieve. Over time, this child will ascend an upward spiral of success in school, and her acquired knowledge and skills will promote continued good health and well-being. A classmate who is unhealthy and unwell, though, accrues more absences, which reduces his opportunities to learn. He therefore scores lower on achievement tests and grows apathetic toward learning, setting his course downward into a negative spiral of disengagement, underperformance, and higher risk for continued poor health and well-being.
The same logic can be applied to adult learners, athletes, teachers, coaches, and others within educational environments, who we would expect to perform their respective tasks better and be more likely to meet their goals when they experience more favorable health and well-being. Consider, for instance, the critical importance of health and well-being in completing a college degree, winning a championship in sport, and teacher retention. Regardless of variables such as a person’s age, the nature of the work to be done, or the targeted outcomes, health and well-being form a lasting nexus with every individual’s lifelong journey of learning. This intersectionality constitutes the thematic focus of this issue of the CEDER Journal.
Consensus definitions of health and well-being continue to elude thought leaders from the many disciplines holding a vested interest in the promotion of optimum human functioning (Bautista et al., 2023). Most authors agree, however, that a deficit-based perspective—that is, characterizing health and well-being as merely the absence of disease or illness—fails to capture a comprehensive understanding of the construct’s complexity, multidimensionality, and role in adaptive behavior (Schramme, 2023). For our purposes here, we have chosen to view health and well-being interchangeably and holistically and suggest that they cover the complete palette of personal choices and experiences associated with an individual’s ability to meet standards of wellness, defined by either oneself or others, across multiple domains (e.g., physical, emotional, social, spiritual, occupational), over the course of one’s life. This perspective recognizes that health and well-being may involve both agency and circumstance, be evaluated subjectively or objectively, and be understood relative to different life stages or events. Moreover, given the potential for wide variability, standards of wellness could be defined quantitatively (e.g., a person’s degree of physical wellness) or qualitatively (e.g., the meaning a person assigns to spiritual wellness). We leave it up to our contributing authors to adopt and defend a stance on how best to conceptualize health and well-being, given the nature of their work as well as its disciplinary traditions and appropriate applications.
This issue consists of three tracks for manuscript submission: (a) community-engaged scholarship, (b) university-based research, and (c) cultural development. Our intention is for the community-engaged scholarship track to attract contributions that draw upon the conventions of community-based participatory research and similar approaches in which scholarly inquiry is co-designed and knowledge is co-produced through university-community partnerships. In this vein, we hope to learn more about how such approaches can best support health and well-being in applied educational settings (e.g., early childhood centers, schools, sport and recreation programs, community centers for adult learners). The university-based research track is meant to garner contributions from the basic sciences, laboratory studies, investigations of college learners, and other health and well-being research conducted on college and university campuses. Finally, contributions to the cultural development track could involve exploring and analyzing aspects of cultural growth, identity, practices, and/or transformation within a society or community.
References
Bautista, T. G., Roman, G., Khan, M., Lee, M., Sahbaz, S., Duthely, L. M., Knippenberg, A., Macias-Burgos, M. A., Davidson, A., Scaramutti, C., Gabrilove, J., Pusek, S., Mehta, D., & Bredella, M. A. (2023). What is well-being? A scoping review of the conceptual and operational definitions of occupational well-being. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 7(1), e227. https://doi.org/10.1017/cts.2023.648
Schramme, T. (2023). Health as complete well-being: The WHO definition and beyond. Public Health Ethics, 16(3), 210–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/phe/phad017
