Sustaining Your Wellbeing In Higher Education

This book provides an evidence-based approach to sustainable self-care, anchoring these strategies in individual academics' core personal values. It teaches readers how to use their values to leverage self-care strategies into a workable, individualised, and effective map to wellness. Working in the demanding environment of higher education can leave little time for self-care, yet making space for wellness and self-care is an essential part of creating a creative and innovative environment for academic work. This book shows how to create and successfully implement realistic self-care plans. By identifying core values and using these to develop individualised self-care plans, Sustaining Your Wellbeing in Higher Education pushes back against a one-size-fits-all approach, while also discussing the role of self-care in academic labour activism and providing strategies for readers to become advocates for better self-care practices within their zones of influence. Designed to provide academics with the skills they need to develop workable and sustainable self-care plans, this book is an invaluable resource for students and professionals working in all areas of higher education.

Wellbeing is foundational to citizens’ individual and collective ability to acknowledge, address, and alleviate ongoing struggles, shared risks, and the unprecedented challenges of our time. A holistic focus on wellness across campus communities is timely and important, given that national and global justice movements are calling upon post-secondary institutions to address the ways in which education systems have been reproducing dominant narratives, reinforcing systemic discrimination, and retaliating against education leaders who work to disrupt structural inequalities. Leadership Wellness and Mental Health Concerns in Higher Education offers diverse perspectives about whether and how campus leaders around the world are sustaining and advancing health and wellness in unprecedented times and amplifies diverse voices in the exploration of how to advance individual and collective wellbeing in higher education. Covering a wide range of topics such as stress management and burnout, this reference work is ideal for academicians, scholars, researchers, administrators, practitioners, instructors, and students.

This book offers pragmatic guidance to support academic and student services staff in both being proactive within their role to promote a positive approach to wellbeing, and understanding how to care appropriately for students who may not be flourishing in the university environment.

The workplace has significant influence over our sense of wellbeing. It is a place where many of us spend significant amounts of our time, where we find meaning, and often form a sense of identity. Creating a Place for Self-care and Wellbeing in Higher Education explores the notion of finding meaning across academia as a key part of self-care and wellbeing. In this edited collection, the authors navigate how they find meaning in their work in academia by sharing their own approaches to self-care and wellbeing. In the chapters, visual narratives intersect with lived experience and proactive strategies that reveal the stories, dilemmas, and tensions of those working in higher education. This book illuminates how academics and higher education professionals engage in constant reconstruction of their identity and work practices, placing self-care at the centre of the work they do, as well as revealing new ways of working to disrupt the current climate of dismissing self-care and wellbeing. Designed to inspire, support, and provoke the reader as they navigate a career in higher education, this book will be of great interest to professionals and researchers specifically interested in studies in higher education, wellbeing, and/or identity.

Student wellbeing is foundational to academic success. One recent survey of postsecondary educators found that nearly 80 percent believed emotional wellbeing is a "very" or "extremely" important factor in student success. Studies have found the dropout rates for students with a diagnosed mental health problem range from 43 percent to as high as 86 percent. While dealing with stress is a normal part of life, for some students, stress can adversely affect their physical, emotional, and psychological health, particularly given that adolescence and early adulthood are when most mental illnesses are first manifested. In addition to students who may develop mental health challenges during their time in postsecondary education, many students arrive on campus with a mental health problem or having experienced significant trauma in their lives, which can also negatively affect physical, emotional, and psychological wellbeing. The nation's institutions of higher education are seeing increasing levels of mental illness, substance use and other forms of emotional distress among their students. Some of the problematic trends have been ongoing for decades. Some have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic consequences. Some are the result of long-festering systemic racism in almost every sphere of American life that are becoming more widely acknowledged throughout society and must, at last, be addressed. Mental Health, Substance Use, and Wellbeing in Higher Education lays out a variety of possible strategies and approaches to meet increasing demand for mental health and substance use services, based on the available evidence on the nature of the issues and what works in various situations. The recommendations of this report will support the delivery of mental health and wellness services by the nation's institutions of higher education.

This text supports pre-service teachers in developing mindfulness strategies as they undertake professional experience.

This book is open access and discusses the re-imagining of the higher education sector. It exposes problems that relate to the way that universities have become over-managed business enterprises which may not reflect societal, national, or global educational needs. From there, it proposes some solutions, including three innovative programs, that make universities more responsive to needs, as well as reduce their impact on the environment. The central idea of this book is developing the ‘Distributed University,’ which distributes education to where it is needed, reducing local and global inequalities in access, and emphasizing local relevance in place of large centralized campuses, with a low impact on the environment. It emphasizes the distribution of trust in place of managerialism and collaboration in place of competition. By focusing on distributing education online, this book discusses how the higher education sector can be set up to adapt to the changes in the ways we work and learn today, and which will be required to adapt to and take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Academic staff and students within higher education settings are confronted by a learning environment that is academically stimulating, informative, career-focused and socially rich, which can be intensely competitive and highly charged. Within this learning environment, academic staff and students are often at risk of compromising their wellbeing in their pursuit of academic excellence. This book provides an examination of the key areas that are important to the sustenance of wellbeing within higher education settings, with a view to promoting healthy learning environments. The chapter authors are predominantly working in the Asia-Pacific rim, but the book also includes more universal perspectives. The synthesis of the issues covered in the book is crucial to the understanding of higher education as not only an environment for gaining knowledge and skills relevant for success in academic and career domains, but also as an environment for developing socially adept and authentic communication skills. The ideas presented in this book will further assist academic staff and students to consider ways to more fully participate in their learning environment so that they can optimize their valuable contributions to the professional communities they serve.