Name
2294 - Visualising adolescents’ wellbeing and flourishing in a music-focused secondary school
Date & Time
Thursday, July 30, 2026, 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Description
The wellbeing of adolescent school students with substantial musical engagement and expertise remains significantly underexplored within educational research. While music education is associated with well-documented challenges, school music programs can nevertheless provide deeply meaningful experiences that fundamentally shape young people's development and support them in becoming their best selves. This study employed innovative creative arts research methods to visualise and understand adolescent wellbeing and flourishing within a music-focused secondary school context. The positive psychology PERMAH model (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishments, and Health) (Kern, 2022; Seligman, 2011) was adopted as the theoretical framework to enable systematic exploration of the multidimensional nature of adolescent musical flourishing. The research was conducted in a small senior secondary school located in an Australian capital city where music is integrated into every aspect of the curriculum and school life. This unique educational setting primarily serves students who had previously become disengaged from mainstream education, with music functioning strategically as both a re-engagement tool and a vehicle for helping these young people reconnect with learning, succeed academically, and develop broader life capabilities. Data were generated through a participatory draw-and-tell task with eight Year 11 and 12 students (aged 16-18 years) who received pastels and standardised paper templates to respond visually to the question "What do you enjoy about learning music in this program?" Participants then engaged in semi-structured interviews that elicited rich descriptions, concrete examples, and personal narratives illuminating their visual representations. The eight student drawings are presented in gallery-style format accompanied by detailed first-person captions constructed through careful restorying of interview transcripts to preserve authentic adolescent voices. These multimodal data were subsequently analysed deductively through the PERMAH framework, revealing both the complexity and distinctive characteristics of adolescent music-wellbeing literacy (Oades et al., 2022) within this alternative educational context. The findings offer valuable insights into the tangible and abstract pathways through which adolescents conceptualise music for wellbeing, providing practical implications for music education policy and practice that demonstrate how intentional pedagogical approaches can leverage music learning to systematically support adolescent wellbeing across diverse school settings.
Location Name
210A - Poster Gallery
Session Type
Poster Presentation
Presenter(s)
Jason Goopy
Poster Board
70