Born on a far northern Scottish Isle and educated in Glasgow, my career in education started in a busy secondary school in the deep, dark Scottish Borders.
My enthusiasm and youthful inexperience led me to spend a full week strictly adhering to my teaching plans, word for word. At the end of this first week, I was left confused and wondering who Ken was. The elusive “Ken” seemed to pop up in many of my interactions with pupils: “Ah ken, miss…” or “Miss, I d’ken”.
When I finally deviated from my teaching plans and paused to ask pupils about this, they fell about laughing and promptly schooled me in some Scottish Borders dialect. And now I ken what they were talking about.
As a young teacher, this was an important lesson and it serves time and again as a reminder of the importance of being on the same page as the young people we are educating. So, too, is it important that we are on the same page as our colleagues.
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Scotland editor’s view: Let’s put an end to jargon-ridden language in education
As Scottish education has evolved, there has been an explosion of professional terminologies, concepts, taxonomies, lingo and jargon. The word “wellbeing” is a great example.
In 2004, A Curriculum for Excellence (remember the indefinite article that got dropped at some point?) documentation stated that successful schools must ensure that health and wellbeing values are deeply embedded within the school ethos, which has led to a framework (GIRFEC, 2006) and a set of outcomes (SHANARRI, 2016) to measure the success of this.
However, the word “wellbeing” itself is seldom defined. Rather, it is observed, with descriptions of a construct offered in place of a clear definition. This creates difficulties if we are to plan for and respond to our pupils’ needs.
Attempts to measure and quality-assure pupils’ wellbeing can be tricky if we are all looking for different things. What a word like “active” means to you, for example, may be wildly different from what “active” means to me, or a pupil, parent or fellow educator.
Understanding what ‘wellbeing’ means
Governing agencies lack consensus as to a clear definition of “wellbeing”. Is wellbeing “an individual’s perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards, and concerns”, as the World Health Organisation would have it? Or is wellbeing construed in accordance with a set of indicators, as the Scottish government suggests? Or can it be measured by examining “material wellbeing, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and house and environment”, in line with the approach taken by Unicef?
There is clearly a subjective element to our understanding of wellbeing. Fortunately, educators and schools are placing a greater value on practitioner-led research, which can help form an understanding of how each setting defines and measures their own wellbeing and that of their pupils.
A shared understanding of concepts, ideas and definitions of health and wellbeing is central to ensuring that plans are manageable, and to the aim of embedding across all areas of the curriculum. Without that, our shared “wellbeing” goals may well be lost in translation…ken?
Kirsten Colquhoun is a teacher and MEd graduate in Scotland
