Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Futurity of Student Well-Being
181 Plays1 year ago
This episode our on-air host Paula Jean (PJ) Broderick is joined by Dr. Rick Ezekiel, Patty Hambler (CACUSS President), and Dr. Sterling Crowe as we explore the topic of Futurity of Student Well-Being. We hope that you enjoy and choose to follow along as we release a number of episodes geared towards celebrating our past, present, and future as an organization.
About:
The CACUSS 50 Oral History Project is an initiative of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services in recognition of our organization's 50 years of engaging student affairs professionals in Canada.
The series of podcasts is recorded and produced by: Sean Fast, Adam Kuhn, Nicholas Fast, Rachel Barreca, Stephanie Muehlethaler, Noah Arney, Sally Chen, Estefania Toledo, Paula Broderick, Jennifer Brown, Margaret de Leon, and Becca Gray. This podcast is recorded, produced, and published on the traditional territories of hundreds of Indigenous nations from across the northern half of Turtle Island, also known by its settler-colonial name, Canada. We are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land. For more information on the territories you may reside on, visit: https://native-land.ca/
Credits:
Music: Expanding the Limits | Performed by Audiorezout & Written by Oleksii Striapchyi | Stock Media provided by Audiorezout / Pond5
Podcast Cover Art by: Ravi Gabble (UTM)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Overview
00:00:16
Speaker
Hi and welcome to Caucus's 50th Anniversary Oral History Project. Today's episode is Futurity, a special on student well-being. Today we've got three guests. The first one is Dr. Rick Ezekiel. He is the Vice Provost, Student Affairs at Dalhousie University and holds a PhD in developmental psychology and education from the University of Toronto OISE and MSc in neuroscience from Western University.
00:00:45
Speaker
Rick's research focuses on impacts of marginalization and developmental adversity on post-secondary students learning and mental health.
Meet the Experts: Rick, Patti, and Sterling
00:00:54
Speaker
Our second guest today is Patti Hamblar. Patti is the director of student affairs and services at Douglas College and the current caucus president. As a student affairs leader, Patti is passionate about lifelong learning, health promotion, and community building. Within student affairs, Patti has worked in a variety of roles over the past 24 years
00:01:14
Speaker
including residence life, student leadership development, peer programs, and health promotions. While at UBC, Patti was deeply involved in the implementation and adoption of the Okanagan Charter and worked closely with faculty members and educational leaders to explore the ways that the learning environment can support and enhance student well-being. Our final guest today is Dr. Sterling Crowe.
00:01:39
Speaker
Sterling is the Associate Dean of Student Wellness and Equitable Learning at Humber College. He holds an EDD in Educational Leadership and Higher Education from the University of Western Ontario, as well as an MA in History and a Bachelor of Education from Nipissing University. Sterling's doctoral work focused on facilitating conditions for equitable and socially just mental health and accessibility services provision in Ontario colleges.
00:02:09
Speaker
Welcome, everyone.
How Has Student Well-being Changed?
00:02:11
Speaker
So the first question that I'm going to ask to our panel is this. Student well-being has come to the forefront of many people's minds throughout the pandemic. What has been the biggest change regarding student well-being over the last five years? Rick, let's start with you.
00:02:29
Speaker
Sure, thanks for having us and thanks for the question. And I think this is a topic that's on all of our minds and all of our team's minds within our institutions as we work to support our students in the places that they're at after coming out of the years of the pandemic.
00:02:44
Speaker
Many of us will have known over the past decade or so that we've been seeing increased reporting and help seeking as it related to reaching out for mental health supports. And I always try to problematize the notion of crisis around that because I actually think that's a good thing.
00:02:59
Speaker
We've been doing a lot of work around the de-stigmatizing struggles with mental health and encouraging people to reach out for help and raising awareness about signs of distress and that's showing. And we're also seeing that supports in the K-12 system have enabled students who historically often wouldn't make it to post-secondary in the beginning due to presence of
00:03:21
Speaker
neurodiversity, mental health conditions, etc. now coming through our doors. So it's a story of increased help seeking, greater access to post-secondary education, and an opportunity for us to figure out how we realign our supports to better support students.
00:03:36
Speaker
And then with that trend already at play, of course the pandemic happened, right?
Pandemic's Impact on Student Learning
00:03:40
Speaker
So my mind, I always think about this a bit developmentally of who's coming through our doors and what have they experienced over the course of their K-12 education. And we know in Canada we had some of the highest rates of school closures and distance learning during the pandemic globally, in fact.
00:03:57
Speaker
And that has had impacts, and it's had impacts in a few ways. Dr. Todd Cunningham at Boise does a lot of research around learning disability, ADHD, and anxiety and sort of how they play out in terms of influencing students' academic competency development.
00:04:13
Speaker
And he's shown that students who sort of were not able to choose between in-person or distance choice matters. For students who chose distance or online learning, they tended to fare well in terms of academic development, but those who didn't have that choice to make, we saw significant gaps or learning gaps particularly in foundational skills like reading, learning, etc. And those are most stark for students with learning disabilities and ADHD.
00:04:40
Speaker
And of course, navigating those types of challenges and academic competency gaps, which tend to widen over time, will really drive different levels of anxiety, different levels of struggle in engaging with academic material in post-secondary education. And we're going to be seeing that play out over the next decade, right? Where students who might have been in grade one, two, three during the pandemic will be coming through our doors in maybe seven, eight, nine years time.
00:05:08
Speaker
And then I think the last piece of that is really thinking about social emotional learning and development and students having that opportunity to connect with peers, to connect with teachers, to connect with family and really kind of learn how to be pro-social together, learn how to build connections, form a sense of belonging, engage in community.
00:05:26
Speaker
that that was deeply disrupted during a really important developmental period around connecting socially with others. And we know that sense of belonging is a really foundational asset to managing the difficult things that come up, to managing our anxieties, to building a sense of community resilience where we're supporting each other through the hard stuff.
00:05:46
Speaker
So I think we'll have to be really intentional about rebuilding that sense of belonging on our campuses, giving students opportunities to connect and build those peer networks and peer supports that are so critical to their well-being and success. I'd like to pick up on what you're saying about social emotional learning. I definitely have seen in my own household, I have a 19 year old and an almost 16 year old and
00:06:09
Speaker
with the students coming in to post-secondary, I would just add that I think the pandemic brought forward experiences with isolation and, in some cases, maladaptive coping strategies.
00:06:26
Speaker
just surviving during the pandemic, which meant that sometimes they were doing proactive things for coping, and they were doing the things that we like to see people do, reaching out to connect with others, using technology, exercising, going outside. And then in other cases, people turn to using cannabis, using alcohol,
00:06:47
Speaker
spending way more time online than is healthy and using technology in unhealthy ways. I'm not someone who says the technology is just straight out healthy or unhealthy. I think it can be used as a junk food and it can be used in a healthy way. And when someone's spending in ordered amounts of time online on social media, just consuming media and maybe playing some online games that
00:07:14
Speaker
They're immersing themselves into this online context at the exclusion of making friends and having social connection with others. And I think that's something that we're seeing with our youth right now.
Research on Radical Care and Healing
00:07:29
Speaker
I was really struck by the surviving to thriving piece. We've been doing some research at Humber with our child and youth care programs with doctors Catherine Borac and Vanita Varma, who I've worked with Stefania Toledo from our team to do some photographic research.
00:07:48
Speaker
with learners for them to capture the ways of radical care and radical healing in the face of coming out of the pandemic. And I'm continuously struck by the language and the ways that learners are now able to articulate in a nuanced way the variances of identity-based challenges and their pathways to overcoming. And I think of that partnered with our own deeper understanding as a community
00:08:16
Speaker
of what it means to experience adversity and challenges for some members of our teams who have done health promotion work or supported those opportunities for learners to engage around identifying strategies and in building the advocacy. For many of them, this was their own first experience facing any sort of adversity against their identity or
00:08:39
Speaker
there are coping mechanisms and being challenged to find something new as well. And so the opportunity is really hopeful for me, but I do think that we have this really unique space and time that we're navigating through around identifying where our own pieces have come into play and how we can leverage that language and that autonomy and agency around an awareness that something needs to shift for all of us from an individual and community level to be able to meet that moment.
00:09:09
Speaker
What an excellent segue to into the next question, which is in two or three sentences, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing our students today regarding their specific well-being?
Systemic Challenges in Student Well-being
00:09:24
Speaker
I'll get us started. I go straight to systemic issues within our institutions and within society at large. And I think that for way too long,
00:09:36
Speaker
We have thought of mental health as an individual responsibility and an individual
00:09:44
Speaker
you know, phenomenon. It's really not. It's about the community. It's about the ways in which we experience our lives day to day. And for students, the biggest things that I see right now are health care systems that are overburdened and not ready for the increased awareness of the importance of mental health. If someone can't even get a family doctor, a basic primary care
00:10:11
Speaker
then they're gonna struggle if they need support. And similarly, systemic issues that we're really seeing right now around racism, food insecurity, housing insecurity, these have deep impacts on mental wellbeing of our students.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah, I would echo that. I'm really stuck on the food insecurity right now in particular and the role of housing insecurity as well. But in terms of levers that folks within institutions can pull more readily, I think often about the food that's made available, the price of the food, our campus is a bit set back.
00:10:49
Speaker
from a lot of locations. So there's not easy access at our North Campus to a lot of different food options that are culturally appropriate, that are relevant for the learning population, that are affordable, that add nutritional value. And I know there's a lot of conversations around strategies to increase sales of food on campus and to limit delivery services and sort of the capitalist
00:11:15
Speaker
poll intention that exists there for those departments meeting their budgetary needs. And then what we're hearing from learners and the ways that the Student Association are rallying, we have a free suit program. And in our photo voice project, we learned that that fridge is always empty because it's so well used that as soon as it is stocked, the food is gone. We have a lot of culinary programs that have very affordable food options. But again, those resources are limited. And so how can we rethink
00:11:45
Speaker
the ways that we enable access to food, is it rethinking mandatory meal plans and housing and why? And to what degree and can you flex it, recognizing the other pressures there and acknowledging that those are unique challenges that are coalescing in one moment in a very critical way for learners that are making post-secondary at large less accessible to the majority of the community that we're hoping to serve.
Innovative Solutions for Student Wellness
00:12:16
Speaker
I think my colleagues here so articulately named the additional pressures, right? And the really pressures are on basic needs like food, housing, et cetera.
00:12:26
Speaker
that drive stress that layers on to what we know students already find quite stressful in terms of their academic stress, their career-related issues they might be facing, finances, those things that we hear over and over again through lived experiences as well as research that are challenges for students. I think an opportunity in all this that we have too as post-secondary institutions is
00:12:51
Speaker
Many of our organizations have people who are doing cutting edge research and understanding the systemic issues that we're talking about, the mechanisms driving disparities in the world, the technologies that can be the solutions and also the ones that are driving issues like climate change and more severe weather events.
00:13:08
Speaker
So one thing I think we really need to think about for our students is in this time where we have so many stories of crisis, stories of is the world a good place and is it falling apart and is it safe and will it be safe for me and my children. I think those are fair worries that our students are navigating.
00:13:27
Speaker
to really help understand what issues or what kind of mechanisms are driving those challenges and what solutions we can contribute to as humans who are in this world and have to be part of those solutions. And that actually is a really effective mitigator of stress. If we can start to build a sense of control of a situation, we can start to understand the details that drive and the mechanisms that drive issues.
00:13:51
Speaker
and work collectively to solve those issues, I think that's really effective. And part of that is also thinking about a proportionate understanding of risk. So we're at a time where we have way more access to information and we have way broader access to information with global reach. Our stories of risk aren't just local, which they have been for many more decades past. And in doing that, I think we have to help our students kind of
00:14:19
Speaker
understand there are a lot of bad things happening, yes, and there are lots of ways and by lots of measures and lots of indicators telling us that we're living in the least final time in human history. We are having the greatest indicators of health measures in human history, et cetera, et cetera. And we have so many strengths and assets that we can use to solve the problems in our society that we've moved in closing disparities that are less wide than they have been over many times in history.
00:14:47
Speaker
So I think we need to tell those stories, too. And optimism and hope is what helps us solve complex, hard, big, heavy problems, right? Yeah. You mentioned solutions. And I'm just going to ask the panel across the board. Can you describe any innovative programs or solutions or initiatives you're seeing on your campuses or across caucus in the industry that are inspiring or helping make that change and driving that hope?
00:15:17
Speaker
that you mentioned. I can get us started with one. Shirley, did you have something to dive into? So I think one thing that is really exciting to see is more and more faculty taking on understandings of wellness and student well-being and thinking about how to design their curriculum and create their classrooms as spaces of support and connection.
00:15:43
Speaker
When we think about those notions of community connectedness, peer support, et cetera, our classrooms are such an opportune place to build local communities that are understanding, empathetic, supportive, and in a way that I've never seen before, faculty are taking this on and seeing themselves as having a role to play in supporting student well-being. And I think that's really exciting in terms of where the conversations have folded. That's where I get most excited as well. When I think about the, you know,
00:16:12
Speaker
There's accessibility legislation that's just coming in in BC, which is prompting a big conversation around UDL. I see a lot of alignment between these strategic priorities of UDL accessibility, well being, even indigenization and decolonization, all of these things intersect to help create
00:16:32
Speaker
more caring communities and a culture where care is valued in the classroom and throughout the whole college or university experience. And so I'll just mention really specifically some cool examples coming out of BC from Simon Fraser University, which to me was the trailblazer in this area of engaging faculty members around ways in which they can think of their classrooms as spaces for care and wellbeing.
00:17:00
Speaker
When I was at UBC, we did some really interesting community-based research projects with students and with faculty. And there's a whole resource online of well-being and learning environments at UBC. And then I'll also mention BC Campus, which is provincially funded.
00:17:21
Speaker
started out looking at open learning resources and they've expanded their scope to really what are the ways in which pedagogy and curriculum can support students holistically and they've also done a whole series of projects related to well-being and engaging faculty in the conversation. So those are some great places to start if people are looking for ideas around the ways in which to engage faculty members.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, I would echo that too. So, one of the things I was thinking about is at Humber we've introduced inclusive curriculum and well being specialists, particular roles that have parallel positions in indigenous education and engagement as well as innovative learning and our program planning, design and renewal.
00:18:06
Speaker
departments as well so there's a community of practice of folks with particular areas of focus where they come together and embed holistically into new faculty onboarding into the ongoing design and delivery of curriculum and every time it's being brought up again making sure that student well-being is centered in the conversation as opposed to retrofitting after the fact where possible to be able to consider what are the resource allocation needs and
00:18:31
Speaker
other aspects there as well and I'm also seeing the uptake and the desire to come up with particular curriculum alignments whether that be through assignments or partnerships or collaborations with or research projects which has been really inspiring and I think some of those those tools I know we've used I know other institutions have used as well and the GTA colleges sort of came together to do something similar for thriving in the classroom that you can also
00:19:01
Speaker
Check out online that I think is starting to shift conversations in terms of what things
Supporting Faculty for Student Engagement
00:19:07
Speaker
look like. So for a promising practice moving forward, I think the next extension too is to consider things outside of the silos and the organizational structures that we operate within and acknowledge that they're made up.
00:19:18
Speaker
and that it only serves to reinforce those structures to continue to try to piecemeal together some of the resources that are required to deliver some of these programs and offer support to folks who are looking for things. From a college perspective, I often
00:19:33
Speaker
think about in Ontario we have a lot of partial loading contract faculty who are really only able to dedicate at most maybe six hours if we're lucky to their work in our campuses but the passion is there to deliver full-time outcomes and so it requires a more systemic intervention to provide that culture of support to those folks to navigate through and to show up for learners in the way that learners need them to in those spaces.
00:20:01
Speaker
So we've kind of touched on the past and what research and work is being done currently. And although we can't predict the future, I want to ask what new tools, resources, ideas do you think will be developed or need to be developed to improve student well-being in years to come?
00:20:22
Speaker
I think what comes to mind for me initially is a user experience design approach a little bit more. I think we use terminology and buzzwords really effectively, but I think that the issue we often have is landing the plane in terms of what that looks like in practice and so true student-centeredness would
00:20:41
Speaker
have us look at our spaces and places and how someone would navigate through, whether they're physical or virtual, to think through how students' needs are multidimensional and often require the support of a team that comes together behind the scenes in many cases. But how can we make that more visible and accessible to learners so that they don't have to try the multiple door approach?
00:21:03
Speaker
I think we have conversations around organizational structures and try to facilitate partnerships and collaborations, but what does the actual experience of accessing a service look like? And the barriers of closed doors after particular hours, the learner may have experienced the most bravery that they could muster up in their life so far to get to that door, only to find it closed. And I think we have to think about what the impacts of that are and how we may not ever have the opportunity to engage with that learner in that way.
00:21:33
Speaker
again. And so what does that look like? Is it rethinking and extending upon the AI conversations that have taken place?
Technology and AI in Student Support
00:21:42
Speaker
I will shut out. We've been having those conversations pre-chat GPT, which I think is great. We've been leveraging those technologies, but what do they look like from a learner lens and how are we engaging
00:21:54
Speaker
the diverse group of learners that we have at our disposal right now to say really tell us about what this looks like for you and to try to find ways where we can individualize those experiences for as many folks as possible. I would absolutely agree.
00:22:08
Speaker
A former colleague, caucus colleague, Brian Sullivan, who was also the first B.P. students at UBC, would say, be where the students are. So if we take that concept of be where the students are to now and where we are in 2023 and looking forward, we need to think about the ways in which people are accessing information
00:22:30
Speaker
and navigating to find supports. And so how can we leverage technology, AI being the biggest conversation right now, to help people find what they need faster, find the right resource for whatever they're struggling with, and also finding ways to engage students in the way they want to be engaged.
00:22:52
Speaker
Be aware of what social media platforms students are using and more will come. Right now it's TikTok, something else will be the next thing. And we need to stay abreast of where students are engaging in and consuming content because they're consuming that content, whether we're there or not. So we need to be part of the conversation and be where the students are.
00:23:14
Speaker
fully agree with everything that Patty and Sterling have shared. And so much of it in my mind is about removing unmeaningful stressors and barriers from the environment. We know there are some meaningful stressors in learning and development and growth, but there are so many unmeaningful ones in our very clunky, sometimes bureaucratic institutions that are designed with the human in mind. And Sterling highlighted that physical and virtual and information space world, all the way students are engaging with us.
00:23:44
Speaker
I think one other thing, and this is so simple, it's not a technology, it's not something wildly difficult to do, is reconnecting with building human-to-human connection within our communities. I think so much of what we talk about in terms of mental health, well-being, etc., etc., is best supported when students are part of a community of care, when they can reach out to their peers for support or they have a safety net around them.
00:24:10
Speaker
where they have an adult at the institution, a faculty member or staff who they know they can trust and reach out to. So re-talking about what does a community of care look like and helping folks find those connections to each other to navigate the inevitable struggles and stressors that will come up.
00:24:29
Speaker
navigating grief for the first time. So many of our students might have that happen during their time with us as colleges and universities and what a gift for us to get to support a human and learning how to navigate grief, right?
Promoting Mental Health Literacy
00:24:42
Speaker
But we have to be mindful about building those skills and spaces and helping students and faculty and staff and suddenly relearn how to be those supportive humans to each other.
00:24:54
Speaker
And I think that will be sort of the foundation that we need to allow a more sustainable healthcare system to meet the needs of folks navigating more complex mental health challenges. And I think part of what we've seen in the absence of maybe caring and supportive communities is folks reaching out for things that would really fall in the range of
00:25:13
Speaker
typical expected negative emotions and distress in the face of hard things, thinking that, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy is the answer, when more often than not, validation, kindness, care will help us overcome those types of challenges. So that's a critical part of the recipe.
00:25:31
Speaker
And I would hope that moving forward, we do learn more about mental health and what helps build a foundation for good mental health. And so coming back to some of the really important foundational building blocks. So it doesn't always have to be new and shiny. I think we can look at some really important foundational pieces that we already know. And for me, just building off of that is mental health literacy and helping our students
00:26:00
Speaker
and faculty and staff to understand the difference between mental health struggles, mental illness, temporary and normal reactions to life events. And I think right now a lot of that gets balled up into one thing. And at times it can be to the detriment of individual students and to our institutions where we have these long wait times for counseling.
00:26:25
Speaker
for things that students may not actually need counseling for. They may need better social emotional skills to connect with a friend or reach out for help to someone in the community to navigate a difficult time. It doesn't mean that you need counseling for every single struggle that you're going through. And to me, that boils down to mental health literacy. So I hope that some of the shiny new things are actually some of those foundational things that we know to be true and we perhaps haven't
00:26:54
Speaker
integrated them enough into the work that we're doing. And there's always room for more of that. So I love the idea of medical illiteracy and human connection. I think that our colleagues in student affairs can use those points to cultivate and enhance student wellbeing on their campuses. But what role does caucus play in all of this? And are there any other
00:27:22
Speaker
resources or things that student affairs professionals can do on their campuses that can help enhance and cultivate student well-being.
00:27:33
Speaker
I think one role that caucus can play is actually doing things like this, like curating resources, building these skills and offering these resources to our professional staff as well. Help the helpers, right? We have to have teams who are able to fund their oxygen masks first and stay well while helping our communities around us. I think one thing we can also do collectively as professionals and within our institutions is I think continuing to challenge very
00:28:02
Speaker
risk-focused thinking or this risk paradigm that drives us to really compliance-oriented solutions that actually usually undermine human well-being and the very types of connected communities we talk about. Think about the ways we build residence as an example. Sometimes you walk into residence spaces where you literally can tell that architecturally the ways the rooms are set up, the ways there are these really heavy doors that all close and disconnect people in multiple ways were designed to prevent
00:28:32
Speaker
some really bad behaviors that have happened a few times. And you walk into them and you feel a bit sad. Sometimes you walk into it and you're like, this is grim. This is not a nice place to be. I don't feel like this place serves my ability to connect with other humans. So I think we have to really rethink that. I think of New Zealand when they moved in one school district.
00:28:51
Speaker
to remove playgrounds from all of their schools because a child had broken a risk once on a playground and lo and behold what happens next less play less physical motor development less interaction driving and increasing risk
00:29:07
Speaker
far beyond what a sprained wrist or ankle would do, right? So I think we have to challenge ourselves not to get so focused on the small number of challenging behaviours that happen and really rethink how do we build exciting, connected communities that serve all of our well-being.
00:29:25
Speaker
And to me, that's what caucus can help with as well. When we think about these exciting communities where we're connecting people from across disciplines, that's really important because we need to be thinking about wellness from a holistic perspective. To me, it's about culture change.
00:29:42
Speaker
And so partnering with faculty members, with librarians, with food services, with facilities folks to increase mental health literacy within the whole community, and also find innovative pathways towards better mental health.
00:29:58
Speaker
And to me, that's the kind of role that caucus can play and that we can bring back to our campuses is coming together in an interdisciplinary way.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Wellness
00:30:08
Speaker
We're never going to solve this problem just within our counseling centers, just within our student health centers. It needs to involve the whole community. And so we can start with caucus and then we can bring that ethos back onto our campus. I agree. I often think about there's been a couple of different ways it's been said throughout the
00:30:28
Speaker
the conference that we're sitting at while we record, right? It's been, we need to acknowledge that this is not different than student experience at large or first year experience or orientation or the shiny things that always get everyone to come together in a unified way.
00:30:44
Speaker
This is everyone's responsibility and we all do work together in that way. I also think about what the barriers to that might be and so to take a bit of a side step. I think a trend that I've noticed within my own work and in my current position where I'm often supporting families who have experienced the loss of a learner.
00:31:06
Speaker
It's a hot potato of folks around the institution. So it's hard to bring the triangle together of who's actually going to provide support or have a difficult conversation. And so I guess the question might be too, how do we help facilitate folks to do some of the internal work to not want to dodge difficult conversations and to look external to who this is? And that's part of the, it is everyone.
00:31:33
Speaker
type situation, those conversations may not be appropriate for everyone in every role and every position and things of that nature. But I don't think it's any different than what we see when a learner expresses some frustration with a tear in class and then they get rushed to a counseling center. When in reality, they're just upset because you've given them some difficult feedback and maybe in an unkind way. And so, you know, they're just expressing some feelings and need a moment to collect their thoughts and then carry on.
00:32:00
Speaker
But I do wonder how we can facilitate that and help empower people to do some of those language shifts, right? Everything's often couched in one of our big categories. So it's focused on security, but maybe safety is what we really care about. And so how do we enable conditions for safety without it being
00:32:18
Speaker
So policing, you know, we're looking at our conduct processes that we've transitioned to community standards in alignment with our residents standards as well. And one of the things I've posed to the working group is why does everything have a reference to something that feels like policing? Why are there sanctions? Why is it a code? The code implies that nobody can possibly know what it is that we're referring to. So or it requires specialized training. But then we assume that every learner understands what they've agreed to.
00:32:48
Speaker
by virtue of attending our campuses, whether virtual or in person. So I think there's lots of ways that we can practically look and potentially one of the dialogues that we can open up a bit more openly at caucus is how do we start being able to with the mental health literacy and well-being lens, how do we start flipping the script a little bit and to get less risk averse and to think about the words we're using
00:33:13
Speaker
really critically to say, I understand that this is the default word that comes out of my mouth. But what's another word that actually better reflects what our intentions are? And then how will that change the way that we do the things that we do?
00:33:27
Speaker
I think there's such a huge thing that Sterling just shared around notions of interpersonal conflict, which we've seen come up again and again as people settle back into being in spaces together and sharing some social accountability with each other. And I don't know if others have seen this, but we just looked at a lot of our year-end reports at DAL and saw that
00:33:48
Speaker
student on student complaints under things like the code of conduct for things that were really kind of complex. And similarly, faculty on faculty, faculty on staff, staff on faculty, complaints are all up by like three-fold. And a lot of it is really that element of difficulty in having a hard conversation with folks who might be having a negative impact on you.
00:34:09
Speaker
And I think we have a role to play in modeling that. And as a profession within caucus, within our institutions, building a critical mass of folks who say, let's take a breath. Like, let's slow things down a bit. Let's kind of engage in perspective taking and help others kind of navigate difference conflicts on our campuses in ways that aren't really grounded in things that actually kind of usually escalate and cause more distress and disconnect people.
00:34:36
Speaker
So I think there is so much opportunity for us to be that kind of critical force for something a little bit different to the ways we connect as humans as a student affairs profession. So this is the final question and I think I've been thinking a lot about it during this conference is there are human beings behind all of the work we do.
Well-being of Staff and Faculty
00:34:59
Speaker
There are humans who work in student well-being and health promotion
00:35:04
Speaker
And they do the work every day, and it does impact them in lots of ways. And the final question to the panel today is, do you have any thoughts on how the humans behind this work take care of themselves as they continue to do student well-being and health promotion work?
00:35:23
Speaker
I think we should be asking this question every time we bring up student well-being. We should be asking about staff and faculty well-being and how are we, first of all, they're very connected. So we can't have healthy communities if part of the community is struggling and we're only focused on another part.
00:35:41
Speaker
So we need to look at the whole community, the whole system, and ask that question every single time we talk about student well-being. And I think for me, it's about the same things as we've been talking about for students. Honestly, it's about building better mental health literacy amongst professionals, knowing how to talk to a colleague and say,
00:36:02
Speaker
I'm worried about you. Is everything okay? How can I help? And knowing when and how to have that conversation, knowing how to ask for help ourselves. We talk about help seeking behaviors, cultivating those in our students, we need to learn those behaviors as well. And then also going back to the systems, what are the systems that are reinforcing unhealthy workplace behaviors, either at an individual departmental or
00:36:29
Speaker
institutional level. And so it's breaking down some of those colonizing practices within our human resources within the ways in which we're supporting. So I think about it from a leadership lens as well. And how can we do that when we're recruiting, when we're hiring, when we're thinking about how we're giving feedback and how we're trying to help retain people. Well-being needs to be foremost as part of that conversation.
00:36:59
Speaker
Any other thoughts?
Fostering Psychological Safety
00:37:01
Speaker
I think there's two things that sort of come to me. One is really simple boundaries, right? But I don't know that we talk about it in
00:37:10
Speaker
We talk about it in very tangible, practical ways that are like turn off your alerts on your Outlook or make sure you log out of Teams on your phone and things of that nature, which I also highly recommend and do myself. I have a colleague who is brilliant, Eunice, if she's listening, who often says, I am with you for now and I'm with this for now. And it's her way as a psychotherapist of being able to contain her for herself, the difficult conversations that are happening in a space and also model that for the learner that
00:37:40
Speaker
they're working with to say we're in this right now and there's an end and we you know and for her to not have to carry that with her into her evening her weekend and things of that nature so boundaries is one of the things that come up for me and to remind myself of my own boundaries and to do so with the team.
00:37:58
Speaker
The other thing I'm thinking about a lot lately is psychological safety and the ways that we have misrepresented the term and then kind of forgotten the practice in different ways. And so there's a great book that just came out this year, The Psychological Safety Playbook, which is like a one hour listen. It's a very short read if you have a hard copy, but it's all tangible and practical and really focuses on the co-construction element in the truest sense.
00:38:26
Speaker
and making space for the dialogue to exist at all levels of an organization and in all aspects of our work and our lives and I think often about how we forget to do that and how simple those things are and to truly when we say we're co-constructing something make the space for that
00:38:42
Speaker
to happen, especially within community and to recognize that that means being flexible and individual and that that looks different for everyone. So all of the tips and tricks that we share because we're looking for an easy answer often, you know, work for one person in one scenario and in one context, but don't necessarily translate.
00:39:00
Speaker
So I think it's finding the space to hear from others what it is that best works for them and to figure out what accountability might look like and how you can partner with them as an accountability buddy to be able to help facilitate that for each other.
00:39:16
Speaker
I love the notion of how do we collect or gather or support each other within the context of teams to do the hard work
Recognizing Contributors and Indigenous Lands
00:39:24
Speaker
that we do. And I think team is such an important concept here. How do we develop connected, cohesive, high performing teams that help each member of that team engage in sometimes really difficult work?
00:39:35
Speaker
some really tangible and basic strategies like pre-briefing and debriefing for the harvest things we have to do. Pre-briefing means coming together to talk about you know when we face a really difficult thing like the loss of a student or are supporting a student through a really difficult experience they've had.
00:39:52
Speaker
What's our plan? What's our collective plan? Are both individual and collective planning, how to navigate that? And then debriefing is really taking on as a practice, a way of connecting formally as a team. And often we leave it to individuals to ask for that.
00:40:07
Speaker
But so many of us want to show that we're strong. We can do the hard thing. We don't need help after. When, regardless of how good and effective you are at your job, the debrief always adds value in closing the stress cycle a little bit, right? And the work is vulnerable, right? You don't know if you've said the right thing or done the right thing all the time. And sometimes just the ability to connect with some colleagues to say, hey, I just really navigated this difficult situation.
00:40:33
Speaker
you get to process it a little bit, you get to process your emotions and feelings of where you were at in navigating it and also maybe get some support and validation around, hey, that was hard and you did good things that helped make it less hard because often we don't fix things, we don't have the benefit of getting to fix things, right?
00:40:49
Speaker
So I think those elements particularly for our teams in residence life and security and mental health and counseling groups who the nature of their work is often you know supporting other humans with navigating really difficult things. Some basic kind of team cohesion and effective team performance practices can go a long way supporting their well-being. Thank you. I have really enjoyed sitting at the table with you and hearing answers and having this
00:41:17
Speaker
really important conversation about student wellness. I want to thank Rick, Patty, and Sterling for joining me today on the Caucus 50 oral history project. Thank you.
00:41:48
Speaker
The Caucus 50 Oral History Project is an initiative of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services in recognition of our organization's 50 years of engaging student affairs professionals in Canada. The series of podcasts is recorded and produced by Sean Fast, Adam Kuehn, Nicholas Fast, Rachel Barreca, Stephanie Mulettoller, Noah Arney, Sally Chen, Estefania Toledo, Paula Jean Broderick, Jennifer Brown, Margaret de Leon,
00:42:18
Speaker
and Becca Gray. Intro and outro music is courtesy of Alexei Stryapji. This podcast is recorded, produced, and published on the traditional territories of hundreds of Indigenous nations from across the northern half of Turtle Island, also known by its settler colonial name, Canada. We are grateful for the opportunity to live, work, and learn on this land. Miigwetch.