Lifelong Wellbeing Proactive Health Promotion for Positive Health and Wellbeing

Contributions are invited for a special issue of HEJ – on the theme of 'Lifelong Wellbeing – Proactive Health Promotion of Positive Health and Wellbeing'.

Edited by Wayne Usher (Griffith University, Australia), Monika Arora (Public Health Foundation, India), Ian Warwick (Centre for Education and International Development, UCL Institute of Education, London) and Peter Aggleton (UNSW Sydney, Australia), this special issue will focus on ways that education can enable people’s capabilities, capacities, connectedness and strengths to promote health and wellbeing.

Education within this context is understood as using formal, informal and/or non-formal approaches in one or more range of settings (such as, schools, youth services, community settings, homes, workplaces and other professional settings) and with one or more groups such as children, young people, young adults, those in their middle and older years, as well as with practitioners, professional and/or policy makers.

The following types of articles are welcome:

• Original research (qualitative, quantitative and combined approaches), literature reviews/overviews, commentaries and think pieces. The focus of these can be on how education enables personal characteristics for wellbeing (such as, but not limited to, agency, empathy, empowerment, grit, mindfulness, optimism, resilience, self-efficacy, self-esteem); strengthening community engagement and action; creating and sustaining supportive environments (such as health promoting schools and/or other settings-based approaches); health literacy, links between education and health (or other) services/systems, as well as lay people’s engagement with policy development and/or policy enactment.
• Articles on a specific issue or concern (such as the role of education in addressing communicable or non-communicable disease; mental and emotional health and wellbeing; physical activities; food practices; preventing violence and promoting peace) which consider wellbeing in its broad sense (engaging, for example, with cognitive, economic, emotional, personal, professional, social and spiritual factors). Authors may wish to consider how wellbeing can best be enabled by concurrently addressing multiple factors and through peoples’ involvement in the design, enactment and evaluation of multi-layered programmes and interventions.
• Articles exploring the potential of education in arts, culture and sports to contribute to lifelong health and well-being.
• Articles examining physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual practices which engage vulnerable and/or marginalised people to contribute to health and wellbeing.
• Articles may focus on children, young people, young or older adults (or those in their middle years), families, communities and/or those work with them to promote wellbeing.
• All articles submitted for consideration for inclusion in the special issue should be informed by a ‘strengths-based’ approach to promoting and sustaining positive health and wellbeing (such as reorienting work from a morbogenic to a salutogenic position) and may focus on work in low-, middle- or high-income countries.

Instructions for submission

The deadline for submission is Tuesday October 1st 2019.

Manuscripts should follow Health Education Journal's usual formatting guidelines, which are available on the journal homepage under submit paper.

Papers must not exceed 6,000 words in length, including references, figures and tables. All articles will be peer reviewed in the usual way and only those that comply with the journal’s normal expectations will be accepted for publication.

If you would like to discuss your paper informally with one of the special issue editors, please contact (via email) one of the co-editors

Wayne Usher - w.usher@griffith.edu.au

Monika Arora - monika.arora@phfi.org

Ian Warwick – i.warwick@ucl.ac.uk

Please submit your paper through the journal’s online submission and review site here.  When you submit, please mark your paper clearly for consideration for inclusion in the Lifelong Wellbeing special issue. All papers submitted will undergo the standard peer review process.

General enquiries about the journal can be emailed to the editor-in-chief, Peter Aggleton (p.aggleton@unsw.edu.au) or to the journal administrator, Fiona Thirlwell (healtheducationjournal@gmail.com).