Students’ Experiences of Meaningful Situations in School

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on school situations students experienced as meaningful and how these experiences can guide educational improvement. Participants included 15 students in grade 3 from a Swedish school. In this qualitative study, the data consisted of drawings, multimodal productions, interviews, and field notes. The analysis resulted in four themes: Having the opportunity to learn in different spaces; Being free and able to participate; Experiencing caring and sharing, and Recognizing one’s own growth and achievement. The findings suggest that situations students find meaningful involve aspects of both learning and wellbeing. The practical implication for these results is that student-generated qualitative data can help indicate needs for educational improvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Student voice
• learning
• wellbeing
• meaningful school situations

Acknowledgements

The study was supported financially from the EU structural fund project, Arctic Children InNet – Empowering School eHealth Model.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ulrika Bergmark http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7952-5111

Catrine Kostenius http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3876-7202