Teachers’ Collaborative Work at the Boundaries of Professional Responsibility for Student Wellbeing

Abstract

Wellbeing is a current theme in educational policy. However, responsibility for ensuring student wellbeing is an underexplored aspect of teacher professionalism. Although the scope and boundaries of those responsibilities are becoming to a greater extent defined externally, this does not make teachers’ work more straightforward. This article examines how teachers handle ambiguity and tensions in order to find practical solutions in routine work with issues of student wellbeing. Extended observations of collaborative work in a Norwegian primary school and interviews with teachers form the dataset. The analysis centres on different patterns of handling ambiguity and tensions in everyday work. The conclusions highlight the significance of workplace collaborative contexts oriented toward making the complexity and underlying normative tensions of wellbeing work more visible and approachable.