School Counselling 2.0: Reimagining School Wellbeing through the Lens of Positive Psychology 2.0

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-954-4_4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Positive Psychology 2.0; School Counselling 2.0; wellbeing; growthism; international schools; Hong Kong

Abstract

In the high-pressure climate of contemporary schools, counsellors face a tension between institutional demands for measurable success and a desire to address the systemic causes of illbeing to promote sustainable flourishing for the school community. This chapter proposes a pragmatic, reimagined approach to school counselling (School Counselling 2.0) grounded in Positive Psychology 2.0. Drawing on Heidi Rimke’s critique of psychocentrism and Christoph Teschers’ exploration of Lebenskunst (the Art of Living), School Counselling 2.0 challenges growthism paradigms that focus on the pursuit of achievement, and neoliberal narratives that prioritize individual productivity over systemic change, revealing how schools instrumentalize wellbeing and responsibilize students for their own mental health in harmful ways. Instead, it advocates degrowth, simplicity, and an emotional dialectic to foster sustainable flourishing, foregrounding contextual and systemic wellbeing. We interviewed school counsellors in international schools in Hong Kong to investigate their perspectives on counselling. We analysed data using a critical realist informed approach to thematic analysis. The findings revealed that counsellors align – often implicitly – with many of the principles of School Counselling 2.0, emphasizing emotional complexity, systemic advocacy, and intrinsic wellbeing over growth-oriented metrics in their work with students. We conclude that counsellors have agency within a contested wellbeing paradigm, and propose a set of underlying mechanisms and practices explaining how counsellors seek to enact the principles of School Counselling 2.0, negotiating the tensions inherent to their role, aligning transformative practices with institutional goals while maintaining a commitment to holistic, equitable, and sustainable student wellbeing.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mark Harrison
AU  - Alex Tam
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/29
TI  - School Counselling 2.0: Reimagining School Wellbeing through the Lens of Positive Psychology 2.0
BT  - Proceedings of the Positive Psychology 2.0 International Conference 2025 (PP 2.0 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 25
EP  - 40
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-954-4_4
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-954-4_4
ID  - Harrison2025
ER  -