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Dom Orih is undertaking his PhD in Education under the supervision of Prof Komla Tsey, Dr Rhian Morgan, and Dr Hyacinth Udah, at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University. He completed his confirmation seminar on the May 31 this year, and has since published a paper that situates him in his PhD research: Can There Be a Recourse to a Philosophy of Love? A Confronting Question at the Heart of a Poor Pedagogy https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-022-09474-4. Dom’s research topic is: Promoting student wellbeing: the feasibility of family wellbeing soft skills approach in a university access course.
Promoting students’ wellbeing has become a major priority for education providers, educators, and policy makers to foster an all-round development of students. There is a growing interest in soft skills’ development that allows students to problem-solve and thrive in an increasingly complex, rapidly changing, and uncertain world. Yet, soft skills are difficult to define and operationalise in teaching. Dom’s PhD project aims to explore the feasibility of embedding the Family Wellbeing (FWB) soft skills’ approach in the curriculum of JCU Pathways program.
The FWB is an Indigenous-developed evidence-based intervention program that seeks to give people control over the conditions that influence their lives. This program has been used in the past to improve the wellbeing of people in communities, schools, universities, allied health and in many other sectors. Studies indicate that the FWB is potentially a practical approach in teaching soft skills in a curriculum. This justifies the need to explore its feasibility in a university program in order to promote the wellbeing of students.
Dom approaches his study by interrogating the following question:
Is the Aboriginal-developed FWB programme feasible as soft skills training among JCU Pathways students in order to contribute to their wellbeing?
The objectives are:
• To review and analyse international literature on softs skills and student wellbeing.
• To explore the feasibility and acceptability of FWB as soft skills training from the point of view of participants.
• To discuss the findings in the context of international soft skills and student wellbeing literature.
The significance of Dom’s study aligns with the Australian government education policy, and the JCU curriculum model which is to integrate an evidence-informed Indigenous developed program into mainstream curricula. Dom’s study integrates the principles and values of an Aboriginal FWB program into the mainstream curriculum of a university. The findings of the study will inform debates about the nature of soft skills, how to embed them in curriculum, and the wellbeing and education consequences of doing so especially in the context of pandemic recovery.