Flourishing and Well-being: Prof. Lindsay Oades’ Keynote Speech at FoE Conference
June 03, 2024
Contributor: Supriyono
UIII, DEPOK – The 3rd Annual Conference of the Faculty of Education (FoE) at the Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII) featured a keynote speech by Professor Lindsay G. Oades from the University of Melbourne, Australia, with the topic “Flourishing and Well-being in Education” in which he delved into the integration of well-being and education and how it will help students to flourish their life.
Professor Lindsay G. Oades, PhD, is an internationally renowned well-being scientist, researcher, educator, and author. He serves as Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Education and Professor of Wellbeing Science at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Recently, he collaborated with UNESCO on the International Science and Evidence-Based Education Assessment.
Professor Oades began his speech by praising the conference theme, emphasizing its global relevance. “What we’re seeing around the world is society struggling with mental health issues and the health system won’t solve that issue. I strongly believe that a large part of the solution will come through education,” he stated.
He further distinguished mental health from well-being, noting that mental health pertains to the mental state of an individual, while well-being encompasses broader dimensions of human flourishing, citing UNESCO’s aim of education which reads: “Promoting forms of learning and development that equip students to live flourishing lives is the appropriate overall aim of education.”
“In the educational context that could mean academic achievement, ethical goodness, and feeling good while you’re doing it that overall concept of human flourishing sits above a lot of the more specific areas. The key idea here is that this is an appropriate overall aim of education,” he explained.
Professor Oades contrasted this flourishing aim of education with the economic focus of other institutions, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which emphasizes developing human capital as the aim of education. While acknowledging the value of this concept, he noted its lack of ethical considerations.
“Flourishing includes ethics. In this context, that could mean the core ethical tenets of Islam,” he said. “It is a broader thing. Not only the mental health functioning of an individual, but it is the overall experience, which includes education, and economics […] Therefore, I also argue that this is the role of education than it is of a health system. Well-being lives in education. It’s learnable, teachable, doable.”
Central to his discussion, Professor Oades highlighted the need to improve well-being literacy, saying that if we are to embed well-being and flourishing into education, we need literacy as a way of talking about and understanding it.
He mentioned “well-being literacy” as the capability to comprehend and compose well-being language. This capability model includes five components, encompassing well-being vocabulary and knowledge, well-being comprehension (listening, reading, and viewing), well-being composition (speaking, writing, and creating), context awareness (adapting language to context), and intentionality (habit of communicating intentionally for well-being).
“You might ask, why so much emphasis on language? One of the key reasons is that many things are psychological; they live in language. They are largely metaphorical because so many of these things are non-physical, so we use metaphors to make sense of the non-physical,” he explained.
In his conclusion, Professor Oades stressed the importance of language in achieving population well-being and differentiating between well-being and mental health. “If we want to change well-being, let us have a look at the way we use language. Let’s also think about well-being as different than mental health. It is not that one is right and one is wrong; It is that they are two different dimensions,” he concluded.
This year’s theme of the Faculty of Education’s annual conference is “A New Way of Teaching and Learning: Integrating Well-Being in Educational Settings” which emphasizes the integration of well-being into the core aspects of education. The theme resonates with UIII’s mission to provide an inclusive international education that takes care of the well-being of its individuals despite striving for academic excellence aimed at flourishing human life through education.