Keywords

1 Introduction

Pandemic times have brought entwined social, economic, and planetary crises to light, reconfiguring the understanding of what it means to be ‘well’ in a hurting world. In higher education, understanding and supporting wellbeing and connection has always been a significant issue. However, as the world grapples with mental health as a growing health concern, it has become clear that more sustainable and systemic approaches are needed to fundamentally address this critical problem. This is because global rates of mental health concerns have been steadily rising over time (James et al., 2018) and because challenges to individual wellbeing and connection have been exacerbated by the consequences of the global COVID-19 crisis. For example, emerging research in the general population indicates that the pandemic and associated lockdowns have increased the prevalence of psychological distress (i.e., anxiety, stress, depression) and experiences of loneliness and social isolation (Abbott, 2021).

Psychological distress is known to negatively impact individuals’ daily life and interpersonal relationships, as well as their physical and mental health (Cuijpers & Smit, 2002; Essau et al., 2014; Yaroslavsky et al., 2013). In a higher education context, acute psychological distress is reported to have a range of detrimental effects on students’ learning and productivity, including interfering with cognitive functioning and attention (Marin et al., 2011), reducing academic achievement (Stallman, 2010), and contributing to attrition (Dyrbye et al., 2006). In extreme cases, an inability to cope with psychological distress may result in students experiencing suicidal ideation and self-harming behavior (Brownson et al., 2016; Drum et al., 2009).

However, it is imperative to note that remediating psychological distress does not automatically lead to wellbeing. In other words, obtaining good functioning, or thriving, involves more than just the absence of mental illness (see Examining Mental Health and Wellbeing Policies in Universities chapter for various conceptualizations of wellbeing). Moreover, as we prepare our students to face a post-COVID world, they must have the necessary grounding and resources to address the fundamental challenges ahead. The Okanagan Charter of Healthy Promoting Universities (2015) highlights the value of creating campus cultures of wellbeing to not only improve the health of individuals but also strengthen the ecological, social, and economic sustainability of our communities and wider society. While developed in a pre-pandemic climate, this charter posed an action-oriented framework for weaving both an inward and outward focus on wellbeing into the fabric of higher education (see Traversing learning and Leading Collaboration: Stepping Toward New Power Values During Turbulent and In-between chapter for an overview of the framework and how it has been utilized to create large scale change). We take up this call to action in this chapter, outlining ways we can intentionally design to create communities that are ‘response-able’ for both individual and collective wellbeing. In doing so, we hope to facilitate an educational re/turn to grounding Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) practices in a pedagogy of care and connection.

Our motivation to write this chapter stems from our own experiences traversing the complexities of teaching and completing academic work remotely, including attempts to prioritize the wellbeing of our students and ourselves. In writing this chapter, we draw on examples from the online learning and wellbeing education literature and examples from our own practice. We also reflect on the feelings of connection and belonging that emerged as we collaboratively worked on this chapter while living through extended lockdowns and increasing rates of community infection, while simultaneously managing the emotional labor of teaching and performing the academic role online. This chapter will argue for the benefits inherent in an approach that builds wellbeing capabilities through explicit and implicit learning design and pedagogy and positions care as a source of pedagogical capital in teaching well for wellbeing.

2 What Do Wellbeing and Connection Look like in the Future of Higher Education?

In recent years, wellbeing has become a policy priority across many industries and sectors. Indeed, multiple governments worldwide are now including wellbeing as part of their national accounts in addition to Gross Domestic Product. For example, the United Arab Emirates have a Minister for Happiness and Wellbeing (UAE Government, 2021); the New Zealand government has a ‘Wellbeing Budget’ (New Zealand Government, 2021), and Wales have legislation on the wellbeing of future generations (Welsh Government, 2015). Wellbeing graduate capabilities are also becoming increasingly necessary and expected for new graduates, both nationally and internationally. As a result, universities are beginning to implement policies and strategies to promote and support wellbeing among staff and students (for more on this topic, see Examining Mental Health and Wellbeing Policies in Australian Universities).

Given the importance of fostering connection and wellbeing among university students, it is crucial for educators to consider how they may achieve this through learning design and pedagogy. This is arguably even more important in online learning contexts, where students may be socially isolated and dispersed across many locations and where teaching and learning activities are often delivered asynchronously. In the online space, pre-pandemic Sung & Mayer (2012), located reduced opportunities to create ‘social presence’ through the types of formal and informal in-class interactivity, which is often easier or more comfortable in face-to-face contexts. Unfortunately, without this sense of social presence, online students may end up feeling unknown, unseen, and unvalued (Plante & Asselin, 2014). As such, educators need to mediate opportunities to build connectedness and belonging; for example, by planning for frequent peer-to-peer and peer-to-teacher social interactions in the early stages of the semester and scaffolding these activities throughout the entire learning design.

As we now look to rethinking our educational practices beyond COVID-19, universities and educators have both an opportunity and responsibility to reimagine how to best support wellbeing and connection through learning design and pedagogy. Educators may also find themselves well placed to consider the impact of pedagogy and learning design on wellbeing and connection through SoTL evaluations (for more on this, see The Rapidly Changing Teaching and Research Landscape: The Future of SoTL and the Teaching-Research Nexux chapter). As such, we have reached a critical point where additional research—and, indeed, speculative thinking—is required to examine alternative ideas for how teaching and learning activities, including assessment tasks, can be designed to support and promote social connectedness and wellbeing and how these outcomes can be built up over time. Ideally, this needs to be consistently supported throughout the curricula and assessment design of entire university programs. Nevertheless, there is evidence that embedding these even in single-subject designs or through extra-curricular programs can significantly impact student wellbeing (Chilver & Gatt, 2021; Young et al., 2020).

Investing in approaches where all members of the university community learn the multidisciplinary capabilities of wellbeing can facilitate a new paradigm that shifts the narrative from solely focusing on approaches steeped in traditional medical and disease models (i.e., those focusing on reducing ill-being, psychological distress, and mental health disorders). While explicitly teaching future-focused or 21st-century capabilities goes some way to address this, a strategic focus on building wellbeing capabilities is necessary to lead a paradigm shift in higher education. This approach has gained traction over the last decade in both the primary and secondary education sectors, where the application of wellbeing science has been used to build a primary prevention approach, complimenting the necessary investment in treatment and support services (Green et al., 2011; White & Waters, 2015). In addition to the explicit teaching of wellbeing concepts (declarative learning), the weaving of evidence-based practices into the learning design, for example, the use of mindfulness or emotional-regulation practices, has been used to develop core wellbeing capabilities (procedural learning). Such applications of wellbeing science are an effective method of illness prevention (Bolier et al., 2013; Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009), as well as developing the capabilities that lead to optimal performance, including educational outcomes in higher education (Kaya & Erdem, 2021; Oades et al., 2011; Young et al., 2020). However, these approaches typically focus on building wellbeing at an individual level and fail to address the interconnectedness between students and their learning environment and between the learning environment and the state of the world.

3 The Interconnectedness of Individual and Collective Wellbeing

Staff and student wellbeing has always been central to the work of educators; however, they have been further elevated as areas of focus during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide, students were suddenly studying remotely, and feelings of displacement, social isolation, disengagement, and loss of motivation followed for many (Hall & Batty, 2020; Yamin, 2020). Some students may also have been living with pre-existing mental health issues, while many others experienced increased psychological distress associated with the impacts of the pandemic on their lives.

During this time, the international demand for social and racial justice also reached a fever pitch following the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by police on May 25, 2020, in Minnesota, USA. In addition, natural disasters from hurricanes and cyclones to wildfires occurred across continents, further disrupting communities and ravaging the environment. As with the global health pandemic, racism and the impacts of climate change have been recognized as global forces, impacting humanity and beyond (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020). In higher education, these disruptions prevalent in the world have paradoxically foregrounded the importance of the wellbeing of students and staff, yet simultaneously brought additional challenges to promoting and attending to their wellbeing and connection.

In early 2020, as communities around the world began to lockdown in response to the pandemic, individuals were caught in a crisis that, while shared by many, was experienced in a hyper-individualized way. For many, the limits of the world were suddenly contained within the boundaries of their home, which simultaneously became workplace, school, childcare facility, and leisure center, along with the host of other daily functions of domestic life. Ironically, while international borders were closing and state and local boundaries were being imposed, the partitions between many aspects of individuals’ lives became increasingly porous.

In the higher education sector, the intertwining of domestic and professional lives also reshaped the nature of work as subjects and courses were hastily shifted to online delivery. This change for many educators was accompanied by elevated anxiety, particularly for those whose familiarity with the technology required in this form of pedagogy was limited. In addition, the increase in workload for all educators, regardless of their technical capacities, was substantial and has been accompanied by an increase in the emotional labor involved in online learning environments (Nyanjom & Naylor, 2021).

3.1 The Reciprocity of Care: Annie’s Story

As a less-than-tech-savvy educator, my experience in the virtual classroom has been revealing, as my wish to appear competent and capable has frequently conflicted with my desire to be honest and authentic with my students, embracing my unknowingness. For me, the script that accompanies the ‘excellent teacher’ in the neoliberal playbook has been repeatedly rewritten as my clumsy, uncertain, and publicly demonstrated failures have ushered my ‘vulnerable teacher’ self onto center stage. Pleasingly, Mangione and Norton (2020) suggest that pedagogic vulnerability provides an opportunity to reconsider prevailing notions of teaching excellence within higher education.

The learnings that have emerged from my repeated loss of self-regard as competent in the virtual classroom have centered on how care, expressed through deep listening, humor, encouragement, reassurance, and a steady, compassionate presence, has been multi-directional; just as I have worked hard to extend care to my students, they demonstrated their care for me and each other. Care has become a resource in my virtual classrooms from which my students and I draw and which we all contribute to and replenish. The care work of teaching was eased by the care work of my students in a way that I have not experienced in such an immediate and sustained manner when teaching face-to-face.

Care in education has long been acknowledged as central to the work of teachers (Walker & Gleaves, 2016); however, care in higher education has been acknowledged as more peripheral than in school education policy and practice. For the academic who privileges care in their pedagogy, the risk can be that their scholarly heft is undermined among some colleagues, and consequently, critical discussion around educational care can slip into a conversational lacuna in higher education debates (Baice et al., 2021).

These challenges, together with the prospect of a continued landscape of globally distributed students, require close consideration of what wellbeing, care, and connection will look like in a reimagined higher education environment. The post-pandemic academy provides opportunities for a re/turn to the relational core of all teaching and learning, regardless of the mode of delivery or subject matter.

4 Wellbeing as a Shared Responsibility

Wellbeing and mental health are often conflated, creating a range of problematic issues, not the least of which is the potential risk of abdication of responsibility to a single service within higher education. It is becoming more apparent that higher education institutions have a shared responsibility to promote and support the wellbeing of their community (staff and students alike) and provide adequate resources and support services for those experiencing psychological distress (Duffy et al., 2019). It is also vital to recognize the increasing and problematic gap between emerging industry needs and graduate capabilities. Many of these capabilities include what are often referred to as ‘social skills’, such as collaboration, emotional intelligence, and creative problem solving that draw on divergent perspectives, all of which can be developed through the application of wellbeing science. Therefore, it is unsurprising that there is a call for wellbeing to be central to the core business of higher education (Orygen, 2017) and thus the responsibility of all (see Examining Mental Health and Wellbeing Policies in Australian Universities chapter for more on this).

While macro-level university initiatives are one lever to achieving this outcome, these are often complex and time-intensive to implement. However, we can also work in tandem from a meso-level, building capacity for academic staff to design pedagogy and course experiences in such a way that they foster social connection and help prevent or mitigate adverse psychological outcomes for students (Brownson et al., 2016). Feelings of social connection are essential for supporting psychological wellbeing (Mauss et al., 2011), and having a solid network of supportive connections at university helps obtain emotional and instrumental support (Bye et al., 2020). When students feel connected with their peers, they may also feel more motivated to learn (Sung & Mayer, 2012). Engaged and connected students are also more likely to willingly participate in interactive learning activities with their peers, enriching their understanding of the learning content (Kent et al., 2016), and helping develop important employability skills, like teamwork and communication (Boud et al., 1999). Therefore, there is a strong impetus to attend to connection and wellbeing in the classroom, rather than only focusing on the cognitive and metacognitive aspects of learning.

It is also relevant to consider how we can elevate student voice in a shared responsibility model for wellbeing. There is a growing call to incorporate students’ views on these matters, as their voice is often missing from the models we draw upon to support and increase their wellbeing (Colla et al., 2022). How might we move beyond their voice being predominantly present through assessments of teaching and learning in student experience surveys to also include their perspective on how their university experience enables wellbeing and core graduate capabilities; the life skills that will enable them to address a post-COVID world? This may challenge our existing teaching practices, with Wehmeyer et al. (2021) calling for an approach that is more reflective of heutagogy, or self-determined learning. In this approach, the educator plays more of a design role, enabling the autonomy of the student to be prioritized, “with the goal of producing learners who are well-prepared for the complexities of today’s workplace” (Blaschke, 2012, p. 56).

4.1 Co-creating Hope for the Future: Rachel’s Story

In the Before Times, we developed an interdisciplinary subject to support students’ transition from their undergraduate study to postgraduate and job-ready graduate attributes. The curriculum was grounded in the nexus of wellbeing and learning science, leveraging critical insights from the literature to ignite high-quality motivation for students. However, as the pandemic unfolded, uncertainty escalated for students, particularly regarding the impact on their further studies and job prospects. It was clear we needed to revisit the narrative of the subject and curate more intentional practices to develop graduate capabilities to thrive and contribute in a post-COVID world.

We recognized a need to incorporate more student agency in co-creating the learning environment. More importantly, we wanted to elevate their voice and agency to address some of the significant challenges facing the planet. To achieve this, we expanded our curriculum design to build a Community of Inquiry (CoI), where students collaboratively engaged in purposeful critical analysis and inquiry into the subject content (Vaughan et al., 2013). We also grounded our pedagogy in hope. Hope has been identified as a crucial psychological resource that is interactively derived from two distinct cognitive tools, pathways, and agency thinking that support goal achievement (Snyder, 2002). The reciprocal relationship between these factors provides the dynamic motivation to act—a key differentiator of hope from other related constructs such as optimism and self-efficacy (Snyder, 2002). Our goal was to build students’ agency and divergent thinking, developing collaborative partnerships with each other and our teaching team to explore the content and its application to their education and career development. What resulted was an ePortfolio that curated their capabilities to create change in their world.

The impact of keeping our scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) alive in a challenging and changing environment was a powerful experience for both staff and students. As one of our students noted,

(this) was honestly one the most beneficial and definitely the most life-changing uni subjects I have ever done … I learnt so much about myself in the process and genuinely found the whole experience profound and really awakening! …We gained so much, from a developmental aspect, working through the content and connecting with one another.

The shared responsibility for co-creating the learning experience also had a profound impact on the wellbeing of staff, highlighting the interconnected nature of this relationship. This was evidenced by the reflections of one of our educators:

This was a deeply rewarding experience for me personally—to know that I played a small part in supporting the wellbeing and development of our young people as they take their place in the world.

5 Risks to Wellbeing and Connection in Higher Education

Developing this chapter provided a unique opportunity for us to reflect on the embodied experience of engaging in a collaborative process of SoTL in action. Our team hailed not only different disciplinary backgrounds but were also located across the globe. As we reflected on bringing this scholarship to life in our own practice, we identified several inherent risks that emerged, both for the wellbeing of students and our experience in connecting as colleagues.

Reduced teacher presence. In the online classroom, educators need to convey a strong sense of ‘teacher presence’ (Stone & Springer, 2019). Being present in the online space demonstrates to students that their teacher is invested in their learning and available to assist them where required. This is even more important when the constraints of temporality and physicality are loosened (e.g., when the learning design relies heavily on asynchronous teaching and learning activities). There are many ways to create teacher presence in online learning, including posting welcome videos in the learning management system and engaging in asynchronous communication via discussion boards. Another strategy is to create assessment feedback using short video recordings (featuring the teacher’s face and voice) as a substitute for text-based comments. This approach can have a significant impact as assessment feedback moments are one of the few occasions where online students receive individualized information about their learning progress (Henderson et al., 2019).

Considerable research has shown that online students feel more supported, valued, and encouraged by their teachers when they receive video instead of text feedback comments (Borup et al., 2015). This is because the medium of video can convey rich conversational cues, including tone and pace of voice, facial expressions, hand gestures, and body language (Daft & Lengel, 1996). Therefore, when teachers create video recordings that convey messages of care, support, and encouragement (Ryan, 2021), students can see and hear that their teacher values them as individuals (Mahoney et al., 2019).

Online learning platforms are political and pedagogical. As educators moved to online learning platforms out of necessity during the pandemic, it is essential to acknowledge that these virtual gathering spaces are not neutral; rather, like physical classrooms, they are deeply political and pedagogical sites (Smith & Hornsby, 2020). Contemporary education suffers from delusions of universality, informed by the notion that knowledge is global and ‘best practices’ are generalizable, somehow existing outside of the individual student experience (Osberg & Biesta, 2010). When we temporarily lost access to physical classrooms that provide a pretense of neutrality, it became increasingly clear that student and staff contexts have profound material implications for wellbeing and connection. Contexts are a vital force in the connections we make in online spaces of learning. For example, these contexts included feelings of isolation in students who were separated from their family by oceans, while others felt overwhelmed with the constant presence of multiple family members under the same roof. From students and staff working across time zones, unable to participate in small talk about the weather and local happenings, to students experiencing food or housing insecurities, perhaps wondering if university attendance is still a possibility for them.

Still, even while acknowledging the diverse contexts and cultures present in an online classroom, educators may feel unable to attend to these complexities with sensitivity and grace. Some students may choose to make their challenges with online learning visible, while others may regard their socio-material conditions as a private matter. So, how can educators avoid falling back on the comfort of universalizing pedagogical approaches, thereby disregarding differences and ‘making other into same’ (Cliffe & Solvason, 2016. p. 2). One way might be to invite land acknowledgements from each member of the class. This simple move allows students to locate themselves in the world, sharing a brief statement about how they relate to their place, perhaps remarking on what they are noticing or feeling connected to seasonally in the place they live.

While research attends to the importance of designing curriculum for student wellbeing and connection, there has been minimal discussion regarding the implicit pedagogies of the platforms themselves, which engender affective capacities and cultivate ways of doing, being, and relating. For instance, consider Zoom. This ubiquitous platform has found its way into the everyday lives of students and educators worldwide, providing a democratizing opportunity for education rife with pedagogical complexities. When in a Zoom ‘classroom’, opportunities for open dialogue and exchange can be stifled by the platform’s affordances. As users cannot easily look around the room for expressions and gestures typically assist us in negotiating conversation, speaking out comes with the risk of talking over another speaker. Alternately, one can raise a virtual hand to indicate they have something to contribute. This creates pressure for every word and sentence spoken. This new way of performing participation is difficult for some, who may choose to opt out of classroom discussions or share their thinking in the chatbox, in the literal margins of the screen. While these spatial, temporal, and affective forces hold material implications for students that cannot be disregarded, they do not solely or even collectively dictate student experience. They should be acknowledged, however, as vital participants in assemblages of student belonging and wellbeing.

5.1 A Break in Lines of Relation: Angela’s Story

The period during the Trump presidency marked a sharp rise in Asian hate crimes in the United States, and in 2021, eight Asian women were shot and killed in spas in Atlanta, Georgia. This violent event sparked mass protests against anti-Asian violence in major cities across the world. During this tumultuous time, I assigned my predominantly Asian students, many of whom were studying offshore, to watch a segment of a documentary about babies for a class in Educational Foundations. The segment included footage of a toddler in Mongolia sharing his yurt with a rooster and a cat. In our Zoom seminars, several students reacted angrily to the scene, saying that the film was racist because it wrongfully portrayed Asians as living archaic lifestyles.

I defended the documentary, arguing it did not claim to represent the race of the children it featured but rather was intended to provoke conversation about the differences in children’s everyday living and learning contexts. Naturally, the sub-text of this conversation was steeped in the news of the day and the knowledge that anti-Asian sentiment is not only real but largely overlooked. I sensed this was the actual conversation needed at that moment, an acknowledgment of the attack, and an expression of care and concern for Asian students, particularly females. Unsure of how to do this appropriately in an International Zoom call with 185 students, I ‘looked away’ from the responsibility that the moment entailed, damaging the lines of relations between myself, my students, the attacks, and the content of the film. What if instead, I had acted courageously, with an ethos of care? What might have been possible?

6 What If?

We note that in educational spaces there has been a rush to return to ‘business as usual’. The grand neoliberal narrative proclaims that this is the path to economic and national wellness. We hope that this chapter can serve to keep the way open to rethink higher education through the lens of what might be if we integrate wellbeing and connection into the fabric of our institutions. In the spirit of speculative futures, we invite you into our collective reimagining of what might be if we…

  • What if we made a collective commitment to rethinking education founded on an ethos of care, with care defined as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Tronto, 1993, p. 103).

  • What if we acknowledged, developed, and resourced educator competencies around wellbeing in the same way that we bolstered technical competencies in online delivery?

  • What if we considered that rather than being a distraction from meeting learning outcomes, wellbeing and connection are a crucial part of our pedagogy that brings them to life?

  • What if we didn’t wait for pandemics (or other disasters) to catalyze a deep embrace of SoTL in our teaching practice?

  • What if we committed to using class resources/platforms to discuss collective matters of care and concern, to think what matters, and who and how it matters?

  • What if we allowed these discussions to call out our differences and relatedness rather than play at false universalisms? What might this make possible?

  • What if care was a core academic capability that infused teaching and learning practices and the ways of being together as educators, researchers, colleagues within the academy (as has been the experience of this group in writing this chapter)?

As we have illustrated, wellbeing and connection are urgently needed in an aching world and therefore crucial to integrate in higher education. What if we embraced the opportunity to make this change in our world?