There is no doubt that there has been an increased focus on wellbeing in education settings in recent times. While this has risen to prominence through a global pandemic and the subsequent recovery, wellbeing education has become a global trend in school settings over the last decade (O'Reilly et al., 2018). When it comes to population-wide priorities, however, it is imperative to consider systemic and sustainable approaches to implementing initiatives. For example, addressing the upstream determinants of mental health and wellbeing is likely to be a more effective method of health promotion (Lo Moro et al., 2020). Many have argued that educational systems are well placed to implement a health promotion or primary prevention approach (Sturgeon, 2007; Seligman et al., 2009; Slemp et al., 2017). These approaches are predicated on the belief that the development of wellbeing capabilities can buffer against mental illness and support future-focussed skills such as collaboration (Young et al., 2020).

Indeed, in their comprehensive action plan for addressing mental health 2013–2030, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted that school-based approaches are among the most effective for mental health and wellbeing promotion (WHO, 2021). This action plan goes beyond a call for an individual intervention or capability development approach to consider how we facilitate an environment that enables the complexity of wellbeing to emerge.

This is a significant evolution in the application of wellbeing science in schools, as several criticisms have been leveled at early attempts to address this large-scale issue. For example, some have criticized the overfocus on content over context (Ciarrochi et al., 2016; Kern et al., 2020), emphasizing the ‘positive’ over growth and challenge (Wong, 2011; Lomas and Ivtzan, 2015; Gruman et al., 2018), individual over collective wellbeing (Kern et al., 2020; Wright et al., 2022), explicit vs. implicit curriculum (Waters and Loton, 2019), and wellbeing theory vs. learning theory (White, 2021). However, moving beyond these polarities to instead embrace dialectical thinking that allows us to integrate these differing perspectives may enable us to design more sustainable solutions for implementing wellbeing in education. Targeting the specific design of a learning climate that enables wellbeing to emerge can be one way to achieve this.

Wellbeing is a complex, multi-faceted construct understood differently across various disciplines and contexts (Mead et al., 2021; Alexandrova and Fabian, 2022). Broadly it can be defined as feeling good and functioning well both intrapersonally and socially (Deci and Ryan, 2008; Keyes, 2013). We draw on this broad definition of wellbeing, noting that it does not include mental illness or health perspectives that shape the conceptualizations of wellbeing in some disciplines (Mental Health Commission of NSW, 2017). Allison et al. (2020) have argued that facilitating wellbeing occurs not only through targeting individual knowledge and capability development but also through contextual conditions of the learning environment. However, when we think about how educators are being trained, there has been a much heavier focus on teaching about wellbeing, or explicit approaches, rather than teaching for wellbeing, more implicit and contextual strategies that weave wellbeing into the learning environment itself (Ciarrochi et al., 2016; Halliday et al., 2019).

The impact of the global pandemic has shone a spotlight on the need to weave wellbeing into learning environments. For example, in Victoria Australia, the Department of Education has included wellbeing alongside learning at the center of their framework for student outcomes (FISO 2.0¹). Furthermore, at a global level, UNESCO declared that flourishing is “the central purpose of education” (de Ruyter et al., 2020, p. 2). Flourishing involves, in part, “being engaged in relationships and activities that are meaningful,” and it is closely related to the concept of wellbeing (de Ruyter et al., 2020, p. 2). Importantly, UNESCO noted that “Flourishing… requires an enabling environment” (de Ruyter et al., 2020, p. 2). It is imperative that our teachers are prepared through educational programs that explore not only how wellbeing capabilities can be developed and assessed but also how to cultivate learning environments that create a context for flourishing (Allison et al., 2022).

It is these enabling environments that we address in this paper. How might we enable wellbeing and flourishing to emerge through “how” teaching is delivered, irrespective of “what” academic content is being provided? We are curious about what comprehensive wellbeing strategies can be woven into a learning design framework to foster enabling environments, as we know the learning environment can detract from or build flourishing (Allison et al., 2020). This paper will explore the development of a conceptual framework, the Wellbeing Integrated Learning Design (WILD), to address these questions. We seek to support educators to consider how they can design their curriculum and teaching practice to foster such an enabling environment. We outline the WILD framework, providing examples that evolved in the context of two postgraduate programs. Our students are experienced educators seeking to develop their skills in implementing wellbeing education in their context.

This approach has evolved over several years through our teaching in an education faculty at an Australian university. Through teaching wellbeing-related subjects at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level we began to experiment with different ways that we could create an embodied experience of what we were teaching about. This provided fertile ground to trial and iterate our approach across a large and diverse student population of more than 5,000 students over 4 years. In developing the WILD framework, we were cognizant that many of the common criticisms of positive education have been positioned as polarities (e.g., explicit vs. implicit, wellbeing vs. learning theory), and the inherent limitations in this binary and, at times, reductionistic approach (Goodall et al., 2022). Instead, one of the fundamental principles of our approach was to build an integrated framework that moves beyond positionality to an appreciation that each element is important and synergistically influences one another. Our primary aim was to create an embodied and integrated experience through a pedagogy of wellbeing in our teaching programs founded upon a selection of wellbeing theories that can be leveraged in educational settings.

We implemented this approach in the re-design of our postgraduate programs to support experienced educators in integrating wellbeing education in their school context. It was therefore important that the framework be designed to integrate within the existing learning philosophy and practice of the educator. This is crucial contextual background to the development of the framework, as the design was shaped by an appreciation of the audience: existing educational practitioners who have developed skills and comfort in their pedagogy. Therefore, the purpose of the framework was to create a tool to expand their practice by considering how psychological wellbeing theories could be integrated into their curriculum design and pedagogy. These foundational wellbeing theories were selected based on their relevance in supporting a climate for wellbeing to emerge in educational settings. Our criterion for selection was that the theories were well-established with empirical evidence supporting their application in education. We have also provided examples of how learning theory has been infused into the framework to illuminate the synergistic benefits of an integrated approach.

When considering how these psychological theories could be layered upon an educator’s existing approach we began with reflection on our praxis. Using methods drawn from grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), we began by identifying themes in the data from our student experience surveys and unsolicited student feedback. This process identified touchpoints throughout the learning design lifecycle that could be categorized across three broad areas: curriculum design, teaching practice, and teacher attributes. The various elements that made up these touchpoints have been represented in a heuristic prototype in Figure 1 below. We position this as a prototype to indicate that this is an evolving model that has not yet been through rigorous theoretical development but is a useful starting place to gather further data to iterate and refine. Indeed, part of our intention in sharing the development of the approach in this article is to invite further feedback from the broader scholarly community.

We have attempted to create a degree of simplexity in representing the complex dynamic approach to preparing educators to integrate wellbeing using the WILD framework. This identifies several elements that make up this dynamic system, but it is important that our visual representation does not minimize the interplay between each of the parts. Assessment design, for example, could have been categorized as a subset of curriculum design as they both inform and impact upon one another. Each of these elements can be used to determine where we may integrate wellbeing theories in the design of the learning environment. If we look through the lens of curriculum design, for example, we may consider how we foster basic psychological needs (self-determination theory) and positive emotions (broaden and build theory) by designing our curriculum using a Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison and Arbaugh, 2007). We can integrate wellbeing theories in our teaching practice, such as supporting competence (self-determination theory) through creating mastery climates (achievement goal theory) and scaffolding activities to find an optimal skill/challenge balance (flow theory). And finally, we can consider how we model wellbeing practices through our presence as an educator, such as by developing a personal grounding practice before coming into a teaching space to support our capacity to regulate emotions in the classroom (self-as-educator).

Our objective with this paper was to present a framework for facilitating learning environments that enable wellbeing to emerge. An essential criterion for this objective was to embrace dialectical thinking that integrates different perspectives (Gruman et al., 2018) to achieve sustainable wellbeing in education settings. In addition, we sought to emphasize our position that this work is a shift in focus from teaching about wellbeing to teaching for wellbeing. The WILD framework draws on key psychological wellbeing theories and is designed to break our complex dynamic approach down into tangible processes for educators. We aimed to achieve this without minimizing complexity thinking by overlooking the interconnectedness and interdependencies between the framework’s elements (Goodall et al., 2022).

The practical implications of this work are that the WILD framework could be applied across various learning environments irrespective of subject matter because it is designed to complement learning theories. Furthermore, the applied examples from our teaching practice illustrate tangible approaches educators can adopt. This approach has developed as an iterative evolution in our practice, as we sought to find ways to integrate a pedagogy of wellbeing, demonstrating to our students how these theories can be embodied in the ways we design teaching and learning. Early indications in qualitative feedback from education students is that this has been a valuable approach that they could model in their own context. For example, one student noted “The experience of completing the [program] was unique in that, not only were we improving our wellbeing literacy, knowledge and strategies to improve our wellbeing pedagogy but we were also developing and growing our own wellbeing through the purposeful and structured application of wellbeing strategies throughout the courses.” One of the implications of the iterative approach to the development of the framework though is the challenge of analysing the impact from a comparative perspective of our prior teaching approach. Our plan is to conduct an evaluation of the implementation of the framework across multiple subjects to assess its efficacy in building wellbeing for students, as well as the relevant mechanisms that enable this. Such data will also allow a more rigorous evaluation of the cross-application of the WILD framework in subjects that are not specifically teaching about wellbeing.

It is important to acknowledge that we are experienced in the application of the theories outlined in this paper and that relevant professional development may be needed to support educators in implementing the framework in their context. We propose that understanding conditions that foster wellbeing should be considered as a component of teacher professional development if educational systems are expected to promote the wellbeing of students (Colla et al., 2023). Such training could include (a) a solid foundational knowledge of wellbeing theories, (b) consideration of how wellbeing theories can layer with educators’ existing educational philosophy, and (c) capabilities to leverage wellbeing theories in learning design. Additionally, depending on the level of experience and expertise of the educator, they may need foundational teaching skills in order to integrate the theories into their practice. With such training, students in arts, languages, mathematics, physical education, and sciences lessons may be able to enter classrooms to learn subject matter and experience wellbeing.

When developing a prototype framework, a clear articulation of the purpose of the framework is requisite, along with transparency on how the framework is conceptualized and operationalized (Praetorius and Charalambous, 2018). Hence, our work should be read considering some conceptual and methodological constraints. First, our conceptualization of wellbeing does not focus on mental illness. Thus, we do not claim that our approach can remediate psychopathology. Nonetheless, contexts that support basic psychological needs have been associated with lower illbeing (Yu et al., 2016; Mossman et al., 2022). Second, five wellbeing theories have informed the conceptualization of the WILD framework; however, these theories are not meant to be an exhaustive list. A broader range of literature from wellbeing science, such as the dualistic model of passion (Vallerand, 2016), character strengths (Park et al., 2004), and positive psychology coaching (van Nieuwerburgh and Biswas-Diener, 2020) may be relevant, but beyond the scope of the present work.

Third, the approach to the development of the WILD framework is constrained by the wellbeing context in which we are embedded, that is, professional higher education programs in wellbeing science for educators. Our students have predominantly opted to study wellbeing science at a postgraduate level because they have an interest in wellbeing. As a result, they come with a degree of readiness for change in considering how they may integrate wellbeing into their educational practice. Furthermore, the program is developed and delivered in Australia, which ranks high on individualism (Hofstede Insights²), while also representing a multi-cultural environment. We have chosen theories that have demonstrated cross-cultural applicability, however, the universality of the WILD framework requires testing. Establishing the transferability of the framework is crucial because evidence suggests that teaching strategies that work in one context may not be effective in another (Sinnema and Aitken, 2014). However, emerging educational practice highlights the importance of adaptive expertise with a core focus on being responsive to student needs (Le Fevre et al., 2016). We suggest this includes an understanding of cultural factors that impact wellbeing.

To conclude, there has been a global philosophical shift toward recognizing educational institutions as pivotal in supporting wellbeing and building wellbeing capabilities (de Ruyter et al., 2020; WHO, 2021). Accordingly, we believe the time is ripe to consider how we train educators for this changing landscape. We have argued that one way to address this is through wellbeing curriculum design and teaching practice. Hence, we developed a framework for facilitating learning environments that enable wellbeing to emerge, grounded in fundamental psychological wellbeing theories. We recognize that our work is constrained by its preliminary nature; however, we do not position the WILD framework as a fait accompli but rather as a learning opportunity. To that end, we invite conversation about what may be missing and what is essential for a thriving learning climate.

RC and LM contributed equally to the conceptual development, research, writing, and editing of this manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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