Seeds of Narration for Sprouts of Well-Being. A Narrative-Appreciative Inquiry into Students’ Flourishing in University Contexts

In contemporary higher education, students’ experience is often narrated through idioms of vulnerability that obscure the institutional pressures from which such experiences arise (Rosa, 2019; Biesta, 2021). Within this context, well-being has gained institutional prominence: its circulation has expanded the space for acknowledging students’ lived realities, while its translation into policy and programmes largely aligns with managerial logics that leave formative conditions unchanged (Davies, 2015; Volstad et al., 2020). The open question concerns whether universities can foster educational forms that exceed optimisation and measurable output (Barnett, 2011). At this threshold, human flourishing is reclaimed as sustainable well-being: a temporally extended process sustained by the durability of educational environments (Lomas et al., 2025). Rather than denoting a private state, flourishing concerns the expansion of real freedoms within shared worlds (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011) and resonates with UNESCO’s call to renew the social contract for education through horizons that connect present experience with more just collective futures (UNESCO, 2021, 2025). In this way, flourishing redirects attention toward the structures through which educational experience acquires continuity, orientation, and public significance. The university consequently emerges as a narrative reconfiguration in which pedagogical practices, institutional scripts, and material arrangements shape what students can recognise as meaningful, imagine as possible, and carry forward over time (Marginson, 2024; Salemans & Budding, 2022). Situated within this perspective, the dissertation draws on a doctoral study conducted at the University of Padua involving voluntary master’s students in Pedagogy and Primary Education. It investigates how opportunities for flourishing are experienced and articulated within university life, how aspirations for flourishing are expressed in relation to institutional arrangements, and how self-narration mediates these processes. The ultimate aim is to provide an educationally grounded understanding of flourishing that moves beyond individualised models and repositions it within broader ecological dynamics of academic life. The study adopts a qualitative-driven convergent design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018) within an interpretivist paradigm, bringing Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005) into methodological dialogue. The inquiry unfolds through multiple, interconnected modes of participation—questionnaire, narrative writings, dialogical exchanges, and creative artefacts—approached as mutually illuminating rather than hierarchically ordered forms of knowledge. At its core lies WONDER, acronym of Ways Of Narrating Desirable Educational Routes, both an inquiry pathway and a pedagogical design space through which students co-author collective manifestos of flourishing in/for education. Overall, the findings suggest that flourishing is experienced as inseparable from relational recognition, protected temporal rhythms, meaningful participation, and opportunities for contribution. Students’ aspirations consistently reflect these conditions, suggesting that flourishing in higher education emerges less as a personal disposition than as an institutionally mediated process. The present dissertation advances higher education research by foregrounding self-narration as a constitutive dimension of human flourishing and by proposing WONDER as accessible and transferable pedagogical–epistemic form through which student voice assumes a generative role in institutional reflexivity and educational renewal.