Praxis of Educational Well-Being: Embodied Discipline and Moral Limits

• In Event: Discipline, Disparities, and Community Engagement

Abstract

Student well-being has become a central concern for schools and education policies worldwide. While researchers have investigated efficacy of several well-being and social-emotional learning (SEL) programs, there is little attention paid to everyday praxis of well-being. I ask: What pedagogical relations are (re)formed in these explicit articulations of student well-being? How, if at all, do they (re)produce power relations in a classroom? By taking the example of a student well-being and SEL initiative, the Happiness Class, in Delhi, India, I show how the pedagogy of student well-being is deeply intertwined with embodied discipline and bounded by moral sensibilities of teachers. Using four ethnographic cases, I unpack the everyday encounters of discipline realized through embodied sensibilities of students and teachers.

Author

• Neha Miglani, University of Southern California