“Don’t you care about the kids?”::tensions with critical wellbeing approaches in education

Natalie Hendry &amp; Camilla Lindskov<br/>This paper emerges from us both noticing an “aura of positivity” surrounding wellbeing in educational discourses and practices. Such positivity, we argue, limits critical engagement. It can frustrate scholars and educators who care deeply about students and education, who also see value in interrogating the assumptions, values, and practices embedded in dominant wellbeing approaches. <br/>We position these observations alongside what we are seeing in the broad wellbeing scholarship: ununified approaches that point to, in sometimes overlapping or divergent ways, a “critical wellbeing studies” field, albeit one that is scattered across different studies, theories, disciplines and literatures. We bring these two insights together to present our emerging research on the knowledge practices that tend to sideline the essential and productive questions that need to be asked from a critical wellbeing orientation. <br/>