Conference Agenda

Access to information is a general human right. A set of capabilities to find, compare and assess the trustworthiness of information on health (referred here as HL-Info) is needed to secure equity in access to information, and to avoid being misinformed or uninformed. Recent PISA findings showed that only 7.2% of students can differentiate “between fact and opinion as applied to complex or abstract statements” (OECD, 2023). The proportion of adolescents who self-report finding it easy to differentiate whether online information is true or false is much bigger, 59 % in Europe (Smahel et al., 2020). Nevertheless, both figures show that there is a big proportion of those students who lack these central skills. Deprivations and disparities in capabilities to access health information present challenges on their own. However, they matter even more in terms of hampering opportunities to adopting health promoting behaviours (e.g. following physical activity (PA) recommendations) and pursuing good health (e.g. self-rated health, SRH). Co-occurrence of extensive amounts of misinformation, limited capabilities to access valid information, and disparities in health is a clear public health challenge, also among adolescents.

Health literacy (HL) has been recognized as an independent, important and modifiable determinant of health and health behaviour across the lifespan (e.g. Lim et al., 2021; Paakkari et al., 2019), and an important outcome of school health education (World Health Organization, 2021). Among adolescents, good general HL has been associated with various positive health indicators such as PA (Fleary et al., 2021) and good SRH (Paakkari et al., 2020). Also, HL has proven to act as a moderator between individual factors and health (incl., health behaviour), and in such a way that it promotes better health outcomes, especially among those in vulnerable situations (Lahti et al., 2024). Country differences in general HL have been noticed (Paakkari et al., 2020).

To assess if health information is equally available for adolescents in Europe (via HL-Info) and to inform education/public health police and practice, we need further research on low level of HL-Info in different European countries, and if different individual and familial factors place some adolescents in more vulnerable situations in terms of low HL-Info and thereby poorer health.

To address these gaps in understanding, we examined (i) if there are country differences in low HL-Info (in its distributions and correlators), and (ii) if low HL-Info serves as a correlator of SRH and PA across countries?

Global environmental changes in conjunction with substantial social justice issues are impacting the wellbeing of us all, raising significant concerns related to how education can address these challenges (Andreotti 2018). As pointed out in UNs 2022 sustainability development goals report, and research addressing health and sustainability challenges (Franzolin et al. 2022; Malqvist and Powell 2022), the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing global environmental and climate change have deepened the global learning crisis, highlighting the interconnectedness of wellbeing challenges and broader sustainability challenges related to the degradation of nature, and environmental and/or climate change. This accentuates the need for creating a greater awareness of the potentials in linking wellbeing and sustainability in educational research and practice. Broad explorations of perspectives on how the relation between wellbeing and sustainability challenges is addressed and linked to education and learning in schools have been largely absent within research. The paper aims to address this gap, drawing on perspectives identified in a literature review within the research areas of wellbeing and sustainability education. Wellbeing and sustainability are often described as ‘wicked’ or complex problems and challenges, founded in issues of resource justice and inequalities in access to welfare resources, and research addressing these challenges points to the need for a shift towards focusing on the potential benefits of supporting relationality, social cohesion, solidarity, interdependence, and care in schools (Block et al. 2018; Spratt 2017). The conceptual framework that informs and inspires the analysis is drawing on notions of education as a common good and social sustainability, as well as perspectives on the relation between wellbeing, sustainability, and learning. Notions of education as a common good has gained momentum in policy in recent decades, connoting a form of shared wellbeing that is chosen and achieved together (see e.g. UNESCO 2015; 2021). In a discussion of these notions, the purpose of education in schools is described as “being and becoming in the world through engagement in individual and collective actions to take care of shared resources, ways of being, and systems in the interests of social justice and ecological care” (Lotz-Sisitka 2017, p. 65). This emphasizes that taking care of resources is at the core of social justice and that resources must be shared more equitably by all if we understand these resources as a common good. The sharing and (re)distribution of resources is central in notions of social sustainability, defined as a matter of resource distribution – hereunder of opportunities for education, health, wellbeing, and social care, and as distribution between people of opportunities to have, create and experience belonging in social relationships in everyday life (Duff and Hill 2021; Krøjer 2020; Vallance 2011). Spratt (2017) is in her analysis of discursive relationships between learning and wellbeing in wellbeing policy distinguishing between two discourses, wellbeing seen as for learning, and learning seen as for wellbeing. In the first discourse, wellbeing is seen as the servant of learning outcomes, which shows how it may be appropriated to develop a manipulative type of ‘care’ to foster the types of learning that focus solely on the characteristics of human capital favored in the job market. In the second discourse, learning is seen as the bedrock of human flourishing, and as valuable when individual personal development takes place in the context of a democratic learning community, which seeks to ensure all learning is personally fulfilling and meaningful. A similar understanding of the relationship between sustainability and learning is identified in analyses of sustainability policy, emphasizing a political interest in education continuing efforts aimed at economic growth at the expense of social and ecological considerations (see e.g. Jickling and Sterling 2017; McKenzie 2014).