Blog posts

The following Teaching Matters blogs highlight practices around wellbeing, building community and belonging:

• Better outcomes for students = build community: A collation of resources on building community across the University.

• Building community: A co-edited series with Building Community PhD Interns, Yuemiao Ma and Bradley Sharples, who supported work on community building as part the University’s Enhancement Themes activity.

• August 2022 Teaching Matters newsletter: Five key insights to engage successfully in ‘Building communities’, with Collegiate Commentary from Professor Jenny Marie at the University of Greenwich.

• Belonging in the classroom: A series exploring the various benefits of creating a sense of belonging in the classroom, challenges that prevent such feelings, and examples of initiatives across the University.

• Mental health and wellbeing: A series covering a number of topics including peer support, support for mental health, imposter syndrome and resilience.

• Hello, how is everyone?: The importance of checking-in: Dan Castro explains how checking-in can purposefully provide some space for student reflection, and engender wellbeing, playfulness and trust in the classroom.

• How to grow Peer Support, community and belonging for online students?: Shian Holt argues that fostering belonging for online students is key to helping them develop agency and confidence in their own knowledge-production.

• Care as mattering: Dr Omar Kaissi shares an example of how he incorporated mattering – ‘the feeling of being recognised and of importance to someone’ - into his personal tutor practice to support the mental health and wellbeing of his international students.

• Can we really build well-being in the digital curriculum?: Dr Mark Hoelterhoff discusses the importance of understanding mental health from the perspective of flourishing and meaning-finding and offers reflections on how to approach it within our digital education spaces.

• Steps to a future vision for health and wellbeing in Higher Education: Dr Kirstin Stuart James proposes five steps to envision the future of health and wellbeing in Higher Education by emphasising a holistic consideration of teaching and learning occupations, which transcends individual contexts.

• Wellbeing matters. But how can we enhance wellbeing across the academic community?: Dennis Relojo-Howell reflects on his participation in the Learning & Teaching Conference 2022 panel: ‘Wellbeing across the academic community’ (see video below).

Podcasts

Teaching Matters and Wellbeing Service's Wellbeing podcast series 2024.

How Mattering Matters, with Heidi Weston and Peter Felten.

Inclusive Cultures: What experiences give students a sense of belonging or exclusion? (15 minutes): A Teaching Matters podcast episode introducing research on inclusive cultures at the University and the barriers students experience.

Videos

Relationships matter: moving relationship-rich experiences from the periphery to the centre of teaching and learning (58 mins): A keynote talk at The University of Edinburgh's Learning and Teaching Conference 2019 by Professor Peter Felten, Elon University.

Is Mattering a more useful way to think about student belonging at University? (22 mins): A video from an ENGAGE session in December 2021 with Peter Felten and Heidi Weston.

Learning and Teaching Conference 2022

• Wellbeing across the Academic Community, Panel session, with Mark Hoelterhoff, Deborah Holt, Ruthanne Baxter, Dennis Relojo-Howell, and Davies Banda (53 mins).

• 'Building Community' Presentations (44 mins): This video contains three, 15-minute papers: "Building community while teaching data analysis to biologists", by Crispin Jordan; "An exploratory project: Enhancing students’ experience through co-constructing academic community", by Xiaomei Sun, Sepideh Daghbandan, Annie Yang & Farah Akbar; and "Enhancing Postgraduate research students’ experience: Co-constructing peer support community", by Chia-Ying Yang, Farah Akbar & Xiaomei Sun.

• Moray House School of Education and Sport – Student SharePoint:  Supporting, informing and engaging with our students (29 mins): A paper presentation by Sam Fawkner, Emily Birtles & Jiangning Li.

Learning and Teaching Conference 2023

• Creating mentally healthy classrooms – Place2Be and MHSES partnership, by Sam Fawkner, Zoe Robertson and Kathleen Forbes (X mins); and I sat, a solitary student, in a crowded University classroom. An open book and empty cup on the marble table-top, by Neil Speirs and Gabriele Negro (X mins).