Flourishing and Faith: Theological and Psychological Perspectives of Student Wellbeing in Australian Faith-Based Schools

The past decade has seen a significant increase in the rates of psychological distress experienced by young people globally. In response, the proactive teaching of student wellbeing has emerged as a focus for school curriculums. Yet, differences between theological and psychological understandings of flourishing and wellbeing have been highlighted in the literature and research examining these concepts within Australian faith-based schools is lacking. This study explores theological and psychological concepts within wellbeing programs in Australian faith-based schools. Seven Australian faith-based schools provided documentary sources relevant to wellbeing in their school, and interviews were conducted with staff identified as leading school wellbeing programs. A lexical analysis was conducted using the Leximancer program to transform this policy and interview data from natural language into semantic and relational patterns. These results highlighted the automated themes of ‘students’, ‘wellbeing’, people’, and ‘biblical’ as well as the related concepts within each of these themes. Analysis of these concepts, within, and across themes, indicated that both theological and psychological themes were identified in faith-based schools understanding of wellbeing. Further lexical analysis of wellbeing documents from state and federal education agencies highlighted that faith-based schools were including all concepts contained within these government wellbeing documents, whilst also including theological elements. Implications for student wellbeing programs are discussed, particularly highlighting the significance of the research in understanding dual approaches to wellbeing in Australian faith-based schools, exploring the potential challenges, and optimising the flourishing of young peoples’ lives.