Visibility and Well-Being in School Environments: Children’s Reflections on the “New Normal” of Teaching and Learning during the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper aims to contribute to the theory on school-related well-being by applying a qualitative approach that focuses on children’s experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic and conceptualizes them as an epistemic opportunity to reconstruct aspects of school-related well-being from children’s perspectives. Within the framework of the multinational qualitative study Children’s Understandings of Well-being (CUWB), it conceptualizes well-being as a cultural construct and argues for including children’s voices in the process of knowledge production. By drawing on statements from online interviews with 11- to 14-year-old children from Berlin, Germany in spring 2021 during school lockdown and by using a discourse analytical approach, the paper outlines the findings on visibility as a central feature of well-being in school environments that children make relevant for experiences of agency, security, and self. Visibility in school is constructed as a medium of control that subjects their bodies to norms of the school, exposes the individual to the gaze of others, and provides security in the context of the digital sphere and its temptations. The paper argues to systematically include these reflections and assessments of new digital learning arrangements during the Covid-19 pandemic into theoretical concepts on school-related well-being.