2025 Theses Doctoral

Happiness Is...In (Be)Longing: Teaching and Learning Along the Landscape of Happiness in Schools

Dumoulin, Isabelle G.

Happiness has been and continues to be one of the most subjective phenomena in our lives as human beings. Conceptions of happiness range far and wide amongst individuals, with the only exception being that it is desired by all. In this dissertation, I argue that a desire for happiness is interwoven with a desire to belong; in other words, happiness and belonging are interrelated.

To begin, I provide my own perspective and personal experiences as an English teacher, emphasizing the impact of various educational practices, values, and priorities at several institutions on my own teaching and pedagogy. I contextualize my work with happiness and belonging within the histories and offerings of many great giants who have studied happiness and belonging before me.

In studying happiness and belonging as interrelated phenomena, I use phenomenology to guide my research in uncovering their underlying structures and essences through a series of interviews (as I will call conversations) with administrators and English teachers at my current independent school. I use intentional, hermeneutic, and post-intentional lenses to narrow the scope of my questioning in these conversations in order to create the conditions for descriptions, interpretations, and embodiments of lived experiences of happiness and belonging for these educators.

In learning alongside my colleagues at an institution that centers its mission on connection and belonging, I do not aim to define happiness and belonging in this study, but rather re-think, re-see, and re-imagine what education and schooling might look like when it prioritizes creating opportunities for its community members to discover their own conceptions of happiness and belonging, themselves—as if it could be otherwise.