A couple of days ago, I attended the workshop “Rethinking student belonging and well-being at universities” (recording available here) organised by the Erasmus+ project BELONG. Here are some thoughts!

First: It was really nice to see that there were 100+ attendees in the live event! So cool that so many people were not only interested in the topic, but also willing to attend online! I thought that was really encouraging to see, I would not have expected that but that opens up a lot of possibilities for communicating our own work to a wide audience! Reaching 100+ people at once with the full content is pretty difficult through “just” publishing about work (no matter how well you play the game on X or LinkedIN or some other social media channel of your choice; even if people “like” or repost your post, are they actually clicking through to the full text?), and even at conferences you would probably have to get the keynote speech (oh, look, we got it!) in order to have such a large audience. So how cool is it that so many people attended the event live? Plus who knows how many are going to watch the recording!

The project has been running for a couple of years with universities all through Europe, and they are currently building their website. Currently still under construction, but scheduled to be done early next year.

Anyway — belonging! I have written a lot about different aspects of belonging before, both regarding student and teacher sense of belonging. And many of the facets known from the literature were confirmed in this project (which is always good!). But three points stood out to me specifically.

First, Eva Zermandl mentioned that their research shows that university staff commonly take vacation or holidays to finally work on their research, and don’t take the time to rest. Which I know I do, too (hello, second blog post of the evening…), so I found it very important to highlight as one result of their study. If we want people to feel valued and fulfilled in their jobs, like they truly belong, the meaningful parts cannot be rely on being done on personal time! (Not that the rest of the work is necessarily not meaningful, but you know what I mean) There is something very wrong in the system if we take time that is supposed to be for rest and recovery to work on something that should be an integral part of our jobs, no matter how cool and interesting it is. So I really appreciated this being highlighted as something that is happening to more people than just me!

Then, Stephen Eccles talked about “How to build an environment where students feel comfortable discussing all aspects of mental health and wellbeing?”. In an interview study, he talked to several students who revealed several facets of stigma (and fear of stigma) they face. This ties in well with what we talked about in today’s “inclusive classroom” seminar, where we heard that only about 6% of the students at LU use the Disability Support Services, when about 27% of the Swedish student population self-reports having a disability (where we don’t know how they define it and if they would actually qualify for support if they asked for it, but still there is a large discrepancy). The stigma in Stephen’s talk was illustrated by several cases. One student with OCD was worried that people would think they are insane if they disclosed the diagnose, so they felt like they had to hide their true self. Someone with BPD and ADHD said that diagnosis could make them a target for discrimination and bullying, described as it would give people ammunition and motivation to start pressing buttons in order to find triggers! How horrible is that, I had not even considered that people might do that or that this might be a fear! How horrible!! That same student reports that a tutor can then be an “absolute lifesaver”, if there is a trusted relationship (and for how to build trusting relationships, check out our work ;-)). Someone else with BPD and an eating disorder says that they perceive anxiety and depression mentioned everywhere in all discussions, but not the full spectrum of mental illnesses. And they said that depression often gets “milked” and misused (for example, they mention a peer who had been out three nights in a row and then claimed their depression was to blame for a late submission of an assessment). This is really interesting — is the interviewee maybe misunderstanding how depression works? Or making a competition out of different illnesses and their impacts? Or maybe their observation is accurate and someone is cheating the system. In any case, it shows the resentment that can come from someone getting accommodations based on a diagnose that others then might not think is warranted, so it is definitely understandable why people might not want to disclose.

Another interesting point very worth stressing was that “mental health is not just the absence of mental illness”. We need to do much more than “just accommodate”! I’ve written before about attempts to help with mental health through “finding joy, passion, purpose“, or mindfulness and breathing, or value-based goal setting, (or (as I just rediscovered) Alice wrote a guest post on why the ocean boosts mental health! Enjoy my #WaveWatchingWednesdays, more than 80 so far!)! So how can we integrate that in our teaching?

Lastly, Lesley talked about the importance of actually evaluating if measures (in her case related to accessibility) do as well as we think they do. What staff thinks works well is not necessarily landing for everybody! Very valid reminder…

I thought it was a very well-spent early evening to join the meeting, and it’s definitely worth watching the recording!

P.S.: Belonging is where I can make bubble rings and take pictures, while other people are doing serious training… <3 And come to think of it, mental well-being, too!