Wellbeing 43
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Noshaba Anbreen (Left), Assistant Professor of Education, University of Birmingham Dubai
Resilience, as it is typically deployed in workplace conversations, places the burden of adaptation on the individual. The message, intended or not, is that the system is fixed and people must bend to fit it. Sustainability, by contrast, asks a different question: what conditions need to be in place so that people do not need to recover in the first place? Noshaba also brought the conversation to early-career teachers - a group whose retention is one of the most urgent challenges in UAE education. Her point was not simply that early-career teachers need mentorship, but that the mentorship needs to be honest enough to let someone say: I am not good at this yet. “Gen Z teachers genuinely care about their wellbeing and that is not a weakness in the profession. I see myself as a custodian of this profession. I want excellent teachers to stay in it. Retention is not a workplace issue. It is a wellbeing issue.” Noshaba Anbreen
Wellbeing Is Not a Word for Resilience One of the sharpest contributions of the afternoon came from Noshaba Anbreen, Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Birmingham Dubai, who challenged the way the sector talks about resilience. “In education, wellbeing is too often an afterthought - something that comes after learning plans are implemented and after operational decisions are made. We should be judging an educational institution by how they approach wellbeing. The issue with the word ‘resilience’ is that it is reactive. It suggests we are always recovering from something. How about we focus on being sustainable first?” Noshaba Anbreen, Assistant Professor of Education, University of Birmingham Dubai This particular reframing of the discussion matters.
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