Conference Agenda

In recent years, well-being has become a central reference within educational discourse, particularly in relation to higher education (Fang, Ren, & Sotardi, 2025). This growing prominence does not arise in isolation. It is embedded in a broader post-postmodern condition in which universities are increasingly shaped by acceleration, performative accountability, and competitive logics that profoundly influence how educational experience is lived and interpreted (Donovan, 2013; Rosa, 2019; Biesta, 2021). Within these configurations, academic pathways are frequently reorganised around standardised trajectories and grammars of success, privileging visibility and efficiency over continuity and meaning (Barnett, 2011; Marginson, 2011).
As a consequence, the connection between learning and life orientation becomes increasingly fragile. Students’ experience risks fragmentation, unfolding as a form of shared yet solitary participation in which formal belonging coexists with feelings of disconnection, isolation, and difficulty in being recognised (Barrera Rosales & Marroccoli, 2019).
Within this context, well-being assumes a paradoxical position. It circulates as a promise of care and attentiveness, allowing aspects of student life marginalised to enter institutional discourse. At the same time, it is frequently absorbed into managerial dispositifs that render its enunciation visible without necessarily transforming the pedagogical conditions of formation (Davies, 2015; Volstad et al., 2020; Vohra & Misra, 2025).
It is from within this unresolved configuration that human flourishing comes into view as a pedagogical necessity. The turn to flourishing does not simply broaden the language of well-being; it sharpens the educational question by shifting attention to how educational experience is held together across time—how learning, relationships, and aspirations are enabled to enter into continuity rather than remaining episodic, contingent, or easily disrupted. Understood as a form of sustainable well-being, flourishing names a process through which human development unfolds within lived trajectories, remaining attentive to equity, social justice, and the shared enhancement of educational environments (de Ruyter, 2004; Duraiappah et al., 2022; Lomas et al., 2025).
This pedagogical posture echoes broader international debates on the future of education. UNESCO’s recent work positions flourishing as a normative compass capable of linking present experience with desirable scenarios, without prescribing a uniform vision of the good life across contexts (UNESCO, 2021, 2025).
In this re-orientation, self-narratives come into view as a crucial site for inquiring into flourishing. Drawing on Nussbaum’s (2008) notion of narrative imagination as an ethical capability, self-narration enables individuals to recognise their own lives as already entangled with wider horizons of meaning and possibility. Thus, what is often framed as a private condition becomes, through the mediating role of narration, a matter of collective responsibility (Bruner, 1990; Demetrio, 2012).
If universities can be approached as narrative ecosystems, they are also spaces in which narratives may be reworked, expanded, and held in common. As Salemans and Budding (2022) argue, sharing personal narratives constitutes a powerful way of articulating the public value of higher education—one that foregrounds contribution, relational impact, and long-term significance rather than short-term optimisation.
From this positioning, the research explores how opportunities for human flourishing are recognised and narrated by students within university life, which aspirations for flourishing they express, and how self-narration may sustain their possible realisation in higher education. Attending to students’ stories as both individual and collective expressions, the study also traces which shared dimensions of flourishing emerge across narrative accounts.
These questions guide an inquiry that aims to understand flourishing as a lived and relational educational process, culminating in the co-construction of WONDER (Ways Of Narrating Desirable Educational Routes)—collective narrative manifestos through which students’ voices are returned to the university as a call for responsibility, imagination, and educational renewal.

This paper examines empirical evidence from higher education research on student dropout intentions. Dropping out from university is associated with high individual and societal costs, a lack of innovation, a shortage of skilled workers, and a loss of competitiveness and diversity (Burk/Hetze 2023; Heublein et al. 2022; Bellmann/Leber 2019; Nairz-Wirth/Feldmann 2018). In addition, one of the European Union's goals is to achieve greater equality of educational opportunity – a goal that depends in part on reducing the number of students who drop out from university (Potapova 2025; Vossensteyn et al. 2015). With European universities already reporting high dropout rates within their specific systems (DAAD 2021, Vossensteyn et al. 2015), universities are under increasing pressure to implement measures to prevent student attrition. In this context, dropout intentions can be regarded as an early warning indicator, thus making it a relevant factor in empirical research and the design of effective prevention and intervention strategies (Deuer/Wild 2018).

Within the Austrian context, the average rate of attrition among bachelor’s students is approximately 30% (with respect to bachelor’s programs commencing at public universities during the winter semester 2016/17). It is important to note that most of the students dropping out from university appear to do so during the first two semesters of study (approximately 20%) (Haag et al. 2025). Consequently, it is evident that the transition to higher education represents a critical period for students, and a challenge for the development of their academic habitus. Addressing the issue at early stages, transition management and the strengthening of students’ resilience resources as part of their habitus development are crucial for their future academic and professional success (Frisby et al. 2020; Lane 2020). Moreover, the development of resilience resources and academic success is favoured by the existence and utilization of social networks at the university (social capital). The development of these networks during the transition to higher education poses another significant challenge for students (Berndt/Felix 2020; Hofmann et al. 2020). These influencing factors – including habitus development, resilience resources and building social networks – have been deeply challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., distance learning, social isolation), which has increased their relevance in the context of higher education research on student attrition in recent years.

Recent studies on academic success rates at Austrian public universities indicate that male and female students perform nearly equally (Haag et al. 2025). However, additional research has revealed that women tend to withdraw from their studies more rapidly than men, should they choose to drop out (Thaler et al. 2021). Thaler et al. (2021) further assert that the observed gender differences in dropout rates are not inherently attribute to gender itself, but rather to underlying factors that in turn are influenced by gender, such as school choice.

Despite the extensive body of literature addressing university dropout, the prior intention to withdraw from university has been less comprehensively examined by higher education research. While the effects of transition management, resilience, social networks and gender on university dropout have been explored separately, a combined analysis from a longitudinal perspective is also rare. The research questions addressed in this paper are as follows:

(1) How do transitional experiences, resilience, and social networks within the university environment affect the dropout intentions of bachelor's students, with a special focus on gender issues, over time?

(2) What possible guidelines for prevention strategies can be derived from this analysis to address the issue of university dropout as early as possible?

Departmental culture is a central aspect of teachers’ working environment in higher education, shaping teachers’ professional development as well as teaching and learning practices. Despite its importance, how departmental culture is perceived across different national contexts remains underexplored. China and Sweden represent higher education systems with distinct institutional arrangements and approaches to teacher professional development, which are likely to shape how departmental cultures are experienced by university teachers. Against this background, this study examines university teachers’ perceptions of departmental culture in China and Sweden and explores how teachers' perceptions differ across professional backgrounds and professional development practices.

The study is theoretically informed by Hargreaves’ (1994) school culture model and its extension to higher education by Tynjälä and Kálmán’s (2019, 2020). Within this framework, departmental culture is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct encompassing:

(1) culture of departmental support of teaching, referring to the extent to which teaching is valued and supported within departments;

(2) training- and project-centered professional culture, capturing departments’ use of formal and organized approaches to teaching development; and

(3) culture of voluntary collegial collaboration, reflecting informal and voluntary interactions among colleagues around teaching and professional development.

Guided by this framework, the study addresses the following research questions:

1. How do university teachers in China and Sweden perceive departmental culture?

2. How do teachers’ perceptions of departmental culture differ across professional backgrounds and professional development practices?

In this study, professional practices are understood as teachers’ engagement in pedagogical studies and professional development activities related to teaching, while professional background includes disciplinary affiliation and teaching experience.

By examining teachers’ perceptions within two national higher education systems, this study contributes to an international perspective on departmental culture in higher education, highlighting cross-national differences as well as differences associated with teachers’ professional backgrounds and professional development practices. The findings are expected to inform ongoing European and international discussions on academic work environments and teacher professional development in universities.

Evidence-based practices have been a central focus in promoting educational quality during recent decades. In contrast to evidence-informed educational practices that primarily draw upon existing theories and preliminary research results, evidence-based practice necessitates practitioners to incorporate evidence throughout all stages of their professional practices to enhance the validation of instructional interventions (Owen et al., 2022). Within teacher education, different forms and scopes of evidence-based enquiry activities have been employed across the globe to enhance instructional quality. These emphasise the significance of teachers leveraging evidence from multiple sources (e.g., empirical research findings, policy documents, and contextual data) to inform their educational decision-making processes (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990, 2011).

Despite the theoretical and methodological advancements of evidence-based enquiry, significant challenges persist in teachers’ implementation. One widespread tension is that teachers may perceive enquiry being situated in formal projects or grants that are separated and disconnected from their everyday practice (Berger et al., 2005). Moreover, teachers’ current evidence-based practices primarily rely on established theories, prior research results, guidance from external experts, and summative student assessment data, with limited attention to students’ thinking processes (e.g., Kretlow & Helf, 2013; Zembal-Saul et al., 2002). Nevertheless, evidence generated by students in real-time interactions is often undervalued, hindering the effectiveness of teacher reflection and the development of their “knowing-to” (Mason & Spence, 1999) required for in-the-moment responsive instruction. Another significant challenge is teachers’ confusion when interpreting and negotiating various sources of evidence that emerge in classrooms, such as curriculum requirements, pedagogical principles, and students’ diverse behaviours and engagement patterns that occur simultaneously (Altinyelken, 2011). These challenges hinder the full realisation of teachers’ evidence-based enquiry initiatives, necessitating significant attention to how teachers can more effectively leverage various sources of evidence to incorporate student thinking into their evidence-based practices.

Therefore, this study aims to characterise how teachers engage in evidence-based enquiry through a student-focused professional learning programme. Specifically, it examines how teachers leverage diverse sources of evidence to investigate student thinking within their instructional practices. The research objective can be unpacked into two questions: i) What constitutes the evidence that teachers leverage when investigating student thinking during enquiry? ii) How do teachers leverage diverse sources of evidence to inform their instructional practice?

This study employs cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as its analytical perspective. Building on Leontiev’s notion of “activity” that involves both materialistic processes as external activities and mental processes as internal activities (Leontiev, as cited in Cong-Lem, 2022), Engeström and Sannino (2021) conceptualise activity system as a dynamic network comprising six interconnected components: subject, object, artefacts, community, rules, and division of labour (Cong-Lem, 2022; Engeström & Sannino, 2010, 2021).

This study specifically centres on the role of “artefacts” and their dynamic interplay with the subject, object, and community across different stages in teachers’ research processes. Artefacts are operationalised as the evidence that teachers leverage during their enquiry into student thinking. For instance, during the planning stage, these involve established theories, prior research results, and curricula that teachers employ to develop their research plans. During the data analysis stage, artefacts involve the empirical evidence that teachers collected during implementation for their analysis and reflection. By examining the various sources of evidence, this study aims to uncover how teachers leverage evidence to investigate student thinking within their instructional practices.