Author: Jennifer Cook
Cook, Jennifer, 2025 Leaders’ and Teachers’ Lived Experience of Change: Re-Culturing a School Through Positive Education., Flinders University, College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Terms of Use: This electronic version is (or will be) made publicly available by Flinders University in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. You may use this material for uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material and/or you believe that any material has been made available without permission of the copyright owner please contact copyright@flinders.edu.au with the details.
The term ‘positive education’ was first used in 2008 (Norrish, 2015; Seligman, 2011) and refers to the practical application of the skills and concepts of positive psychology in an educational setting. Coming from the field of psychology, most of the current research has a quantitative orientation, focusing on evaluating various positive education interventions directed towards students. In contrast this research took a qualitative approach to tell the story of change in a school and explore the ontological experiences of leaders and teachers, as school staff embedded positive education. As deputy principal of the school and in charge of positive education, as an informed researcher, I sought to open an understanding from an insider’s view of one school’s journey of cultural change. I adopted a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, combined with autoethnography. My research interest was the lived experiences of leaders and teachers ‘being-in’ an organisational, pedagogical and curriculum change process.
The research lens was turned first towards the change journey as a secondary school re-cultured itself through the ‘implementation’ of positive education. It then focused on the lived experiences of seven leaders and teachers of the school as they were exposed to significant cultural change. The study offers an autoethnographical representation and a phenomenological rendering of one school’s experience of cultural change. Through autoethnography, open interviews and semi-structured conversations with leaders and teachers, I capture the storylines of change, sharing the phenomenological narratives of the experiences that emerged. This research offers a new dimension to the scholarly conversation about positive education and organisational change because it provides insight from lived experience into the impact on leaders and teachers of one school’s positive education change journey which was from ‘the ground up’ in contrast to most ‘top-down’ change processes encouraged in the past and now. It surfaces how the agenda in reconstituting approaches to change and teachers’ and leaders’ professional and personal identities and workload can have an impact on teacher wellbeing as consequence of how change is enacted.
Keywords: Positive Education, School Culture, Teacher Wellbeing, Care for Teachers, School Change
Subject: Education thesis
Thesis type: Professional Doctorate
Completed: 2025
School: College of Education, Psychology and Social Work
Supervisor: Andrew Bills