Emotion, wellbeing, and professional learning: towards a new conceptual framework promoting agency in student experience

Emotion matters in human experience. It shapes how an individual interacts with their world. Increasingly, emotion is garnering attention in adult education contexts as a core factor influencing wellbeing and learning. It has relevance in the developing professional’s student experience where individuals find themselves enmeshed as active participants in and across a labyrinthine of systems and engaging in person-environment interactions that benefit, challenge, or threaten their student journey. Emotion has a principal role in these interactions, harnessing multiple organismic sub-systems to orchestrate a response according to how the individual construes the interaction. This publication-based PhD examines the legitimacy of these ideas on two levels. First, through an interrogation of five stand-alone publications that each explore the role of emotion across varying adult student populations and second, as an amalgamated project guided by three research questions. The amalgamated project succeeds in a deeper level of examination than previously achieved by the individual articles; it provides new insight into emotion’s role and relationship with wellbeing and introduces an agentic framework for shaping developing professionals’ student experience. The body of work coheres through an epistemological orientation toward Holism. Holism captures the complexity of the developing professionals’ student experience as a product of person-environment interactions, shaped according to biopsychosocial-cultural processes that are directed by emotion. Holism drives the project’s theoretical framework and favours a meta-theoretical examination and methodologically pluralist approach governed by mixed methods. This permits the examination of the developing professional’s student experience as a complex phenomenon; it results in a reconceptualization that is revelatory, moving beyond a descriptive measure of satisfaction to disentangle and distil the multiple layers of interactions that shape the experience. A meta-synthesis approach is used to examine the amalgamated publications and results in an explanatory emotion-wellbeing process map that is bespoke to this population. It also informs the design of a practical emotion-wellbeing framework, centralising wellbeing as a responsibility of all, and promoting agentic orientations through attention to teaching and learning contexts that promote control, certainty, and coping. The framework provides a foundation for future research.