Exploring Individual and Collective Responsibility for Wellbeing through Education Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand. [Roundtable Session] AERA Annual Meeting 2021.

The right to be well is universal. Nestled within burgeoning international wellbeing literature, notions vary regarding the distribution of individual and collective responsibility. Holistic education frames the promotion of wellbeing in policy and potential for practice. Ecological systems, Appreciative Inquiry and a model of holistic wellbeing, Te Whare Tapa Whā, underpin this analysis of wellbeing within education policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand. Text mining software was used to analyse seminal policy documents for wellbeing, identifying concepts, categories and category clusters. Findings provide considerations regarding the conceptualization of wellbeing within education policy as contextualized, relational and nebulous. We argue that it is critical to explore the distribution of responsibility for wellbeing within education policy for the good of all stakeholders.