58.013 - Well-Being: Dilemma or Opportunity in Higher Education

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

A central aim of educational research is to improve the well-being of students and families, specifically attending to their cognitive, nutritional, and social-emotional needs. Increasingly, this research has taken an internal gaze into the university community itself with apparently growing accounts of student vulnerability, from reports of stress-induced problems to reports about abuse and human welfare. Within this internal gaze, the needs and realities of those outside the academy’s walls intersect with those within the academy’s walls, urging universities to re-examine their mission, research, and outreach while enacting their guiding philosophies to create healthy and open environments for learning and service that improve the human condition. These shared realities of life outside the academy and life within the contours of the academy may be perceived as either dilemma or opportunity. This session aims to address two broad questions related to how institutions of higher education translate their commitment to improve the human condition, and how well-being is conceptualized, lived by students, and promoted by and positioned within educational institutions? In this session, education deans will address these broad issues, considering as well the role of schools of education to frame appropriate epistemologies, pedagogies, and approaches foundational to the concept of well-being in the pursuit of equal educational opportunity and change?

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• James Earl Davis, Temple University

Participants

• Stanton E F Wortham, Boston College

• Hardin L.K. Coleman, Boston University

• Karen Symms Gallagher, University of Southern California

• Wanda J. Blanchett, Rutgers University

• Diana E. Hess, University of Wisconsin - Madison