Conference Agenda

Educator well-being has emerged as a central challenge for the sustainability of contemporary education systems, with recent increasing research interest in work-related stress (Alegre & Labajo, 2023; Gudelos & Mabitad, 2025). Work-related stress remains a leading cause of sick leave and exhaustion among educational professionals, occurring in a context characterised by increasing instructional demands, diverse student needs, chronic absenteeism, mental health challenges among students, and expanding administrative responsibilities (Howard & Howard, 2020; Pavlidou & Alevriadou, 2022; Skaalvik & Skaalvik, 2017). Although schools have introduced organisational responses for teacher well-being, such as co-teaching, inclusive classroom arrangements, and expanded support staff, there is limited empirical knowledge of how such arrangements and educators’ everyday work experiences relate to physiological stress and recovery over time.

Responding to the ECER 2026 theme, ‘Knowing and Acting: the changing conditions and potentials of education research,’ this study examines how emerging data practices reshape what is known about educator well-being and how this knowledge may inform organisational action in schools. Rather than conceptualising stress as a psychological outcome from respondent metrics (e.g., Mañas & Ang, 2025), the study approaches well-being as an embodied, practice-based phenomenon produced through the temporal and organisational conditions of school work.

Methodologically, the study employs a mixed-methods design integrating three data sources: (1) continuous psychophysiological data from wearable smartbands (e.g. stress and sleep-related indicators), (2) individual-level survey data based on the Swedish version of the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-Being 7 Item Scale (SWEMWBS) (Stewart-Brown et al., 2009), and (3) administrative and observational data capturing daily work activities.

The empirical material is collected across multiple school contexts and includes a range of professional roles, such as principals, teachers, teaching assistants, and support staff. Biometric data are linked to temporal distinctions between work, non-work, and sleep to examine patterns of stress and recovery across individuals and educational roles (Gunnars, 2026).

Initial findings from the first sub-study demonstrate systematic differentiation between activity states. Preliminary analyses indicate heightened stress during scheduled work hours than during non-work time, suggesting distinct physiological patterns associated with the temporal organisation of school work. When linked to survey data, tentative patterns further indicate that lower self-reported well-being tends to co-occur with elevated physiological activation during work and less pronounced differentiation between work and recovery periods. While exploratory, these findings expand research that emphasises roles of meaning in life (e.g., Yildirim et al., 2024) by suggesting an alignment between subjective well-being and physiological embodied stress regulation.

It also highlights the importance of developing organisational temporal work structures that enable proper recovery at home, rather than isolated high-intensity intervention events.

In subsequent phases, the study will extend this integration by linking biometric and survey data to individual scheduling information detailing activity type, duration, and instructional formats, enabling fine-grained analyses of how pedagogical organisation and workload configurations shape physiological stress and collaboration over time (Gunnars, 2025).

The study contributes to health and well-being research in education in two key ways. Empirically, it provides, through the smartbands, a granular account of educator stress that moves beyond self-report by situating well-being within everyday educational work practices (Gunnars, 2026). Methodologically, it demonstrates how combining wearable data, survey instruments, and organisational information expands the epistemic conditions of education research, making otherwise invisible pressures visible and supporting more informed and actionable approaches to designing sustainable and health-promoting educational work environments.

Digital wellbeing has emerged as a key concern in education systems worldwide as digital technologies increasingly mediate children’s learning, social relationships, and everyday experiences. Across Europe, policy frameworks such as the Digital Education Action Plan, DigComp, and the Better Internet for Kids (BIK+) strategy explicitly position schools and educators as central actors in supporting digital wellbeing. However, despite this policy emphasis, research and practice remain fragmented, with persistent gaps between conceptual definitions, governance frameworks, and school-level implementation. This proposal addresses this fragmentation by examining how digital wellbeing is conceptualised, governed, and enacted across European education systems.

The central research question guiding this study is:

How is digital wellbeing conceptualised, governed, and enacted in school education across European contexts, and what systemic conditions enable or constrain its sustainable implementation?

Sub-questions include:

1. How do European and national policy frameworks frame digital wellbeing and allocate responsibility across system levels?

2. How is digital wellbeing operationalised and measured in contemporary educational research?

3. What forms of educational practice demonstrate coherent alignment between research evidence, policy intentions, and school-level realities?

The study is grounded in a systemic and relational theoretical framework, drawing on three complementary strands of scholarship. First, it engages with digital wellbeing theory, which conceptualises wellbeing not as an individual trait but as an emergent property of socio-technical environments shaped by design, context, and power relations (Büchi, 2024; Smits et al., 2022). Second, it draws on policy enactment theory, which highlights how policies are interpreted, translated, and negotiated within schools rather than implemented in linear ways (Ball et al., 2012; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016). This perspective is particularly relevant in European education systems, where supranational frameworks are adapted within diverse national and institutional contexts. Third, the study is informed by socio-cultural and ecological approaches to education, which emphasise the interaction between learners, educators, institutions, and broader governance structures.

Together, these perspectives support a reframing of digital wellbeing as a shared, system-level educational responsibility, rather than an individual behavioural outcome. The European and international dimension is central to the study, as it explicitly examines cross-national policy frameworks, comparative national strategies, and transferable educational practices. By integrating evidence from multiple European contexts, the research aims to contribute to international debates on how education systems can respond more coherently and equitably to the wellbeing challenges of digitally mediated childhoods.

In light of current societal changes and the impacts of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health—particularly among children and adolescents—has been deteriorating increasingly (Ravens-Sieberer et al. 2022). Against this background, life skills (LS) and social-emotional competencies such as relationship skills (e.g. empathy) and self-awareness (e.g. regulation of emotions) are gaining importance (Durlak et al. 2022). Promoting such competencies in the school context is proving to be an increasingly promising approach that, in addition to improving mental health, can also yield further positive effects. The evidence base is grounded in a large number of quasi-experimental and experimental studies demonstrating that well-implemented school-based programs social and emotional learning (SEL) programs foster social and emotional competencies, enhance positive behavior, reduce negative behavior, improve emotional well-being, and also lead to improvements in academic outcomes (Durlak et al. 2022).

The accumulation of evidence supporting the effectiveness of interventions in everyday classroom practice represents a key milestone on the path toward the widespread integration of evidence-based approaches in educational practice. However, the journey toward the sustainable implementation and institutionalization of evidence-based approaches in the school context, so that they can unfold their intended effects, remains long and marked by numerous challenges (Durlak & DuPre 2008). Notably, the state of research regarding the scaling up of SEL programs is considerably less developed than research on their effectiveness (Combs et al. 2023).

Following the initial implementation of evidence-based approaches—which typically requires substantial external support (e.g., professional development) to achieve high fidelity—practitioners (e.g., teachers) are increasingly expected to assume responsibility for sustaining the approach, while external support is gradually reduced. Ultimately, an approach should continue to be delivered with sufficient quality even after the complete withdrawal of external support in order to achieve the intended program goals (see e.g. Shelton et al. 2018). In practice, however, such an ideal-typical implementation process—culminating in the large-scale sustainment of evidence-based approaches in everyday school life—is often not fully realized, which makes fidelity-consistent continuation and the associated intended positive effects less likely (Combs et al. 2023; Lyon et al. 2024).

For example, Combs et al. (2023), in their study on the large-scale implementation of an LS program across 158 school districts (419 schools) in the United States, found that two years after the withdrawal of support provided during the initial implementation phase, 59% of schools no longer implemented the program at all, and only 30% continued to deliver the program with fidelity. A further 11% of schools still used the program, but less intensively than intended. Whether the intended positive effects are sustained in schools or classrooms where a program is continued (at least in part) after the initial implementation depends on aspects of implementation quality including fidelity (i.e., adherence to the program) and dosage (i.e., the amount and intensity of program delivery; see e.g. Durlak & DuPre 2008).

To sum up, there is a steadily growing body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of SEL-programs. However, less is known about whether programs continue to achieve their intended effects in everyday school practice after the withdrawal of implementation support (Herbein et al. 2020).

The present study investigates how an Austrian primary school SEL program, for which an effectiveness study has already demonstrated reductions in internalizing and externalizing problems, is sustained in routine school practice and whether it continues to produce its intended effects.

This study examines the relationship between student engagement and well-being. Following the research tradition of positive education (Seligman et al., 2009), this paper argues that well-being plays a central role in academic success. A well-established framework within this paradigm is the broaden-and-build theory. The theory states that positive emotions have the potential to broaden people's mental thought-action repertoires and thereby create opportunities for building up personal resources. In contrast, the theory postulates that negative emotions lead to a narrowing of the thought-action repertoires by remembering the urge to act in a certain way. In general, this makes it more difficult to build up resources (Fredrickson, 2001). Based on the broaden-and-build theory, the upward spiral hypothesis was formulated. The hypothesis states that positive emotions can set off an upward spiral. Therefore, personal resources increase the likelihood that positive emotions will be experienced again in the future (or vice versa in the case of negative emotions) (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002).

This study focuses on two key constructs in positive education: the tripartite model of student engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004) and subjective well-being (SWB) (Diener, 1984). The tripartite model consists of three dimensions: behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement. Behavioural engagement (BE) includes following the class rules, emotional engagement (EE) encompasses the affective reactions (e.g., interest) to the learning activity, the teacher or the school and cognitive engagement (CE) comprises psychological investment in learning. SWB consists of three dimensions: positive affect (PA) (e.g., proud), negative affect (NA) (e.g., sad) and global life satisfaction (LS).

A large number of studies have demonstrated the positive link between the two constructs. Some of these studies have modelled SWB as a predictor of student engagement (Datu, 2018), while a second group of studies have chosen an inverse modelling (Kessels & van Houtte, 2022). In addition, there is a third group that have used a reciprocal approach (Datu & King, 2018). The majority of studies in this field of research use cross-sectional data, while longitudinal studies are the exception. There is not only a lack of plurality in terms of study designs. In all reciprocal studies with latent constructs known to the author from 2003 to 2024, no European samples have been examined. Additionally, only in one case (Datu & King, 2018) lower secondary education students were analysed, including all three dimensions of the SWB. This would be important, as they distinguish between affective states and cognitive assessments on the one hand, and on the other hand, the two affective states do not represent opposite poles of one dimension, but can vary independently of each other (Diener, 1984).

The present study aims to bring more plurality to this field of research. Therefore, it examines the relationship between the two constructs, considering all dimensions of SWB using a longitudinal European sample of lower secondary education students. Based on the theoretical framework and previous empirical studies, it is hypothesized that positive affect as well as life satisfaction are positive, reciprocal associated with student engagement and negative affect is negative, reciprocal associated with student engagement.

Using a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM), a statistically significant bidirectional association between student engagement and PA was identified, whereas the links between student engagement and NA were not significant. With regard to the dimension of LS, it was found that a high level of student engagement at the first measurement point leads to greater life satisfaction at the second measurement point. The inverse effects were not statistically significant. The results show that promoting student engagement can lead to an increase in some dimensions of SWB, and in turn helps to sustain student engagement.