Department of Social Inquiry

This article examines the insinuation of therapeutic culture into everyday life from the vantage point of a qualitative cross-generational study of economically marginalized young women and their mothers. Against dominant assessments of therapeutic culture — as representing cultural decline, social regulation or transformation — we draw on interview narratives to analyse its practical and situated effects. We argue that desires for disclosure and open communication are not trivial or narcissistic and instead interpret them as productive emotional strategies for managing difficult circumstances, and for engendering a sense of competence and possibility.Thus a concern with`talkingthings through' is neither ineffectual nor adequately understood as a manifestation of an ahistorical feminine alignment with emotions and interior life. While we do not dismiss regulatory aspects of therapeutic culture, our analysis offers an alternative and empirically based account of the ways cultural imperatives are enacted across generations.

The promise of the new underpins much educational reform discourse, from utopian strands and grand gestures to more formulaic rhetoric found in declarations of new policies for new times. Informed by genealogical and feminist approaches, this essay introduces some conceptual frameworks for analysing such expressions of hopefulness and newness in educational discourse. While its initial impetus is debates about the education of adolescents in interwar Australia, it extends to a consideration of relations between future-oriented utopian aspirations in the past and educational discourses and practices in the present. It calls for more reflexive problematisation of the past–present relationship in historical and sociological studies of education, and outlines an argument for taking account of the ‘untimely’ in educational discourses and practices.

Drawing on an historical study of adolescence and education in Australia in the middecades of the twentieth century, this paper explores narratives of schooling from the standpoint of pupils who attended school in the 1930s and 1950s. First, we consider a common theme that has emerged in our interviews, which we describe as the “happy childhood” or “happy schooldays” narrative, and outline some fruitful ways of understanding the cultural and subjective significance of this construction of schooling and growing up. We argue that these seemingly generic narratives offer insight into how the present is experienced and constructed, not only how past educational experiences are remembered. In doing so, we explore the work of memory and nostalgia in accounts of the self as a student, and propose a rethinking of nostalgia as more than romantic sentiment and as more than a simple story of social decline. Nostalgia, we argue, is pivotal to how participants construct a critique of their present and navigate the shifting relationship between past and present. Second, we offer some preliminary methodological observations on the challenges in undertaking and interpreting oral histories in educational research, noting some practical and conceptual dimensions, including the effect of researcher memory and desire on the interpretation of school-day narratives.

This paper maps the background to a cultural history of adolescence in Australia in the period 1930s-1970s. The project examines scholarly and professional ideas about the purposes of secondary schooling, debates about the personal and civic values young people should embody, and ideals of citizenship and the kinds of social knowledge that schools should foster. These are matters that command considerable public and policy attention today, and are commonly aligned with concerns about students' wellbeing, which is part of personal development curriculum but also tied to whole-school and system agendas, supported by extensive policy frameworks and service provision. The following paper develops three interrelated themes. First, it outlines some of the ways in which our study is examining antecedents to contemporary concerns about social values and wellbeing, and the kinds of policy and curriculum responses they have generated in earlier times. Second, we bring together the study of school curriculum and the study of student guidance and counselling, arguing that this allows for a more complex view of the formation of the 'personal' and of social knowledge and dispositions and the relationship between the two. Third, we outline the rationale for our decision to focus on the decades of the 1930s, 50s and 70s, and show why we are exploring the history of adolescence via an examination of school curriculum (policy reforms, knowledge areas, materials and texts) and student psychological guidance. This includes consideration of the influence of international philanthropy upon the translation of ideas, practices and policy models in Australian education. Finally, much recent discussion about citizenship and school values has tended to be dominated by polemic and polarised positions, when their significance warrants responses from a variety of research-based perspectives. Historical studies provide valuable vantage points from which to assess the purposes and values of secondary schooling and its role in fostering young peoples' wellbeing and educating them towards citizenship.

Edited by Katie Wright & Julie McLeod

This volume offers a critical rethinking of the construct of youth wellbeing, stepping back from taken-for-granted and psychologically inflected understandings. Wellbeing has become a catchphrase in educational, health and social care policies internationally, informing a range of school programs and social interventions and increasingly shaping everyday understandings of young people. Drawing on research by established and emerging scholars in Australia, Singapore and the UK, the book critically examines the myriad effects of dominant discourses of wellbeing on the one hand, and the social and cultural dimensions of wellbeing on the other. From diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, it explores how notions of wellbeing have been mobilized across time and space, in and out of school contexts, and the different inflections and effects of wellbeing discourses are having in education, transnationally and comparatively. The book offers researchers as well as practitioners new perspectives on current approaches to student wellbeing in schools and novel ways of thinking about the wellbeing of young people beyond educational settings.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Inventing youth wellbeing -- Julie McLeod & Katie Wright

2. To be well is to be not unwell: The new battleground inside our children’s heads -- Linda Graham

3. Vulnerability and wellbeing in educational settings: The implications of a therapeutic approach to social justice -- Kathryn Ecclestone

4. The limits of wellbeing -- Johanna Wyn, Hernan Cuervo & Evelina Landstedt

5. Constructions of young women’s health and wellbeing in neoliberal times: A case study of the HPV vaccination program in Australia -- Kellie Burns & Cristyn Davies

6. Young people, sexual pleasure and sexual health services: What happens when “good sex” is bad for your health? -- Ester McGeeney

7. “I’d just cut myself to kill the pain”: Seeing sense in young women’s self-injury -- Kathryn Daley

8. Rethinking role-play for health and wellbeing: Creating a pedagogy of possibility -- Helen Cahill

9. Wellbeing and schools: Exploring the normative dimensions -- Amy Chapman

10. Social-emotional learning: Promotion of youth wellbeing in Singapore schools -- Chong Wan Har and Lee Boon Ooi

11. Happiness, wellbeing and self-esteem: Public feelings and educational projects -- Julie McLeod

12. From targeted interventions to universal approaches: Historicizing wellbeing -- Katie Wright