Call for papers 69

(July-December 2027)

Topic: University Student Life: Well-Being, Trajectories, and Holistic Education[1]

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2027

Issue Coordinators:
Luis Silva Castillo, ITESO, Mexico
Johanna Burbano Valente, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Bogotá, Colombia

 

Contemporary higher education faces complex challenges that go beyond a narrow understanding of academic performance and require a broader view of the student experience. In this context, well-being, student trajectories, and holistic education constitute central dimensions for understanding how students experience, make sense of, and move through university life. Recent studies have noted the presence of stress, anxiety, depression, and psychological distress among university students, highlighting the urgent need to analyze the factors that shape their socioemotional well-being and educational trajectories (León, 2025; Pszczolinska et al., 2025). These conditions are related to dimensions such as social support, student identity, sense of belonging, and identification with the institution, all of which are crucial to students’ retention, participation, and holistic development (Bart-Plange et al., 2025; Pszczolinska et al., 2025).

Student trajectories are not homogeneous. They are shaped by social, cultural, economic, and institutional conditions that affect the university experience in differentiated ways, particularly for students from historically marginalized groups. Therefore, understanding these trajectories requires attention not only to access, retention, and graduation, but also to everyday experiences, spaces of belonging, forms of campus community life, and real opportunities for participation within university life (Bart-Plange et al., 2025; Silver & Harrison, 2024). From this perspective, inclusion and inequality are not approached as isolated topics, but rather as cross-cutting dimensions that make it possible to examine the institutional and social conditions that configure students’ well-being and trajectories.

Within this framework, holistic education, together with the development of cross-cutting competencies such as critical thinking, communication, collaborative work, leadership, creativity, and student agency, emerges as a necessary response for supporting students beyond the transmission of disciplinary knowledge (Agudo et al., 2013; Torres, 2019). Recent research has shown that emotional and psychological education contributes to strengthening well-being, holistic education, and academic performance in university contexts (Mego-Díaz et al., 2025). Thus, holistic education makes it possible to articulate the academic, socioemotional, ethical, and relational dimensions of the university experience.

This issue brings together contributions that analyze the student experience in higher education from a relational, institutional, and educational perspective. Such an approach makes it possible to connect, on the one hand, the conditions of well-being, belonging, inclusion, and inequality that shape university life and, on the other, the ways in which institutions respond to these challenges through strategies of support, tutoring, assessment, well-being management, and the use of evidence for decision-making. In this sense, assessment, indicators, and institutional analytics are not understood from a merely instrumental perspective, but rather as resources that can contribute to understanding, supporting, and transforming the conditions under which student trajectories unfold.

Issue 69 of Sinéctica. Revista Electrónica de Educación invites researchers and specialists to submit research articles and theoretical papers that examine university student life from a holistic and reflective perspective. The issue is not only concerned with describing the characteristics of the student body, but also with examining how student trajectories are configured, which conditions foster or hinder students’ holistic development, and what institutional, pedagogical, and social responses are emerging to support them. This approach makes it possible to move beyond a notion centered exclusively on “the student” as an individual and toward a broader understanding of the student experience as a relational, institutional, and social construction.

Priority will be given to contributions with clearly delimited research problems, analytical and critical approaches, empirical evidence or solid theoretical development, and explicit connections to the institutional, social, or cultural dimensions of the university experience. Opinion pieces, anecdotal accounts, merely institutional descriptions, or pedagogical proposals without sufficient empirical or conceptual grounding will not be considered.

This issue may also serve as a space for contributions derived from academic forums, institutional research, intervention experiences, empirical studies, and theoretical reflections, provided that they engage with the journal’s standards for peer review, academic quality, and editorial relevance. Contributions are expected to expand current understandings of student well-being, differentiated trajectories, and holistic education in higher education, while also offering insights for the design of policies, practices, and institutional strategies oriented toward care, equity, retention, and human development in universities.

Submissions will be organized around the following thematic areas:

 

Thematic Area 1. Campus Life, Relationships, and Student Support

This area includes papers that analyze the ways in which students build relationships, a sense of belonging, and experiences of community life within university spaces. Studies may address integration into academic and social life, tutoring, mentoring, peer support, welcoming practices, community support networks, and programs aimed at strengthening students’ everyday university experience. Particular value will be given to research that examines how these practices and programs foster more collaborative, co-responsible, and inclusive university environments.

Thematic Area 2. Student Trajectories, Inclusion, and Inequalities in Higher Education

This area encompasses research on retention, dropout, academic delay, inequality, vulnerability, disability, participation, gender, diversity, interculturality, and other conditions that shape the university experience and configure differentiated student trajectories. Priority will be given to papers that make visible how exclusion and resistance operate within the university context.

Thematic Area 3. Holistic Education and Cross-Cutting Competencies

This area brings together papers that address critical thinking, communication, collaborative work, leadership, creativity, student agency, and other educational processes linked to students’ personal, academic, and professional development. Of particular interest are analyses of curriculum design, pedagogical practices, and students’ subjective experiences in relation to these competencies.

Thematic Area 4. Assessment of Student Development and the Use of Evidence for Institutional Improvement

This area includes papers on indicators, instruments, measurement and monitoring methodologies, early warning systems, comprehensive assessment, institutional analytics, and decision-making processes aimed at fostering student development and improving institutional support. The issue seeks to recover experiences that demonstrate how evidence can be translated into effective policies for retention and well-being.

 

References

Agudo, J. E., Hernández-Linares, R., Rico, M., & Sánchez, H. (2013). Competencias transversales: percepción de su desarrollo en el Grado en Ingeniería en Diseño Industrial y Desarrollo de Productos. Formación Universitaria, vol. 6, no. 5, pp. 39–50. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-50062013000500006

Bart-Plange, D.-J., Henderson, K., Hoffman, K., & Trawalter, S. (2025). Critiquing and reimagining belonging in public spaces in higher education. Educational Psychology Review, vol. 37, article 87. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-025-10061-z

León Castro, O. A. (2025). Bienestar psicológico como alternativa de mejora al afrontamiento del estrés en universitarios, Piura 2025. Revista Scientific, vol. 10, no. 36, pp. 29–47. https://doi.org/10.29394/scientific.issn.2542-2987.2025.10.36.1.29-47

Mego-Díaz, M. I., Alca-Gutiérrez, M. E., & Palomino-Silva, J. A. (2025). Impacto de la educación emocional y psicológica en la formación integral universitaria. Revista Tecnológica-Educativa Docentes 2.0, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 5–12. https://doi.org/10.37843/rted.v18i2.642

Pszczolinska, M. W., Mavor, K. I., & Miles, P. J. (2025). Student wellbeing in higher education: The role of stressors, student identity, and social support. SAGE Open, vol. 15, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440251359418

Silver, B. R., & Harrison, M. H. (2024). Inequality in the experiential core: Using pathways to understand and improve college students’ journeys. In K. M. Budd, H. E. Dillaway, D. C. Lane, G. W. Muschert, M. Nair, & J. A. Smith (Eds.), Agenda for Social Justice 3: Solutions for 2024 (pp. 55–64). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.46692/9781447371410.008

Torres Cardeña, R. S. (2019). ¿Formación integral en la universidad? La voz de los estudiantes de una universidad privada de Mérida. CPU-e. Revista de Investigación Educativa, no. 28. https://doi.org/10.25009/cpue.v0i28.2601