Year: 2026
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Beyond an international trend or policy myopia, wellbeing occupies a prominent position across educational, governmental, and intergovernmental agendas as a strategic investment generating workforce, and societal returns including educator retention, student outcomes, and institutional effectiveness. In educational environments, dynamic relationships among stakeholders create living ecosystems wherein flourishing emerges from - and simultaneously sustains - the vitality of educators, learners, families, and communities. Recently, intergovernmental educational policy has directed wellbeing attention to the workforce at its heart - educators themselves. Rather than framing teacher and leader wellbeing as a deficit to be remedied, this mixed methods study revealed pathways for enhancing individual and collective wellbeing for early childhood, primary, and secondary educators across Aotearoa New Zealand through an appreciative, transformative, and culturally-affirming lens. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design framed this research as an integrated inquiry: a national cross-sector survey of 735 educators provided statistical breadth, while 10 semi-structured interviews captured depth and complexity. Orienting this interdisciplinary research at the juxtaposition of education, health, psychology, sociology, and organisational scholarship supported the generation of original findings that address research gaps while offering pragmatic frameworks for change. Therefore, theoretical and conceptual anchors for this piece include appreciative inquiry, complexity thinking, positive education, asset-based community development, and indigenous worldviews. Findings revealed educator wellbeing practices as fundamentally relational, paradoxical, complex, and contingent upon organisational and systemic conditions. Contributions to the field include a holistic conceptualisation of wellbeing, empirical findings, and a framework. Rather than prescriptive universal solutions, the framework, An Architecture for Community Flourishing, offers compass-like principles enabling multi-level, context-responsive implementation within and potentially beyond educational settings. This paper proposes that collective wellbeing, operationalised through regenerative responsibility across individual, relational, organisational, and systemic dimensions, offers pathways for community flourishing to emerge.
Source: Frontiers in Education
Author: Suskya Goodall
Institution: Victoria University of Wellington
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
OpenAlex ID: W7162020852