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.

Bringing together international perspectives, this book demonstrates the importance of reframing time in higher education and how we can view it as a resource to support wellbeing and self-care. Time is a central part of our lives and structures our days, and yet often we don’t think about the socially constructed nature of time or how we might reframe our relationship with time and our work in ways that support our self-care and wellbeing. Exploring Time as a Resource for Wellness in Higher Education suggests an alternative way to look at how we structure our time to better support our wellbeing. Drawing on a range of theoretical and personal perspectives, the authors advocate for a reconsideration and reconceptualization of our relationship with time. By sharing their experiences, the authors encourage readers to notice how they spend their time and offer strategies for an intentional focus on the relationship between time, self-care, and wellbeing. Whether it's making time, having time, or investing in time, this book explores strategies and reflections necessary to grow, maintain, and protect wellbeing. This book is a valuable resource for those working in higher education, offering individual, collective, and systemic suggestions and strategies for navigating the ways we see time and wellbeing.

Presenting a collective international story, this book demonstrates the importance of compassion as an act of self-care in the face of change and disruption, providing guidance on how to cope under trying conditions in higher education settings. Practising Compassion in Higher Education presents an opportunity to learn through story and by taking proactive action for our wellbeing. It highlights the need to protect and maintain the wellbeing of staff and students, positioning the COVID-19 pandemic as a major catalyst of disruption. The chapters connect theory with lived experience, exploring self-compassion in work and research, compassion in teaching practice and within the personal/professional blur. The book’s contributors bring a range of theoretical and personal perspectives from various global contexts, sharing their own approaches to self-care and how compassion has become a central and crucial element of this practice. This book takes a unique approach to navigating and surviving the higher education environment and offers valuable lessons for the pandemic era and beyond. This will be an essential resource for students and professionals working in all areas of higher education.

Supporting Student and Faculty Wellbeing in Graduate Education recognizes new pressures impacting graduate students and their supervisors, teachers, and mentors globally. The work provides a range of insights and strategies which reflect on wellbeing as an integral part of teaching, learning, policy, and student-mentor relationships. The authors offer a uniquely holistic approach to supporting the wellbeing of both students and academic staff in graduate education. The text showcases optimized approaches to self-care, self-regulation, and policy development, as well as trauma-informed, arts-based, and embodied pedagogies. Particular attention is given to the challenges faced by minority groups including Indigenous, international, refugee, and immigrant students and staff. Providing a timely analysis of the current issues surrounding student and faculty wellbeing, this volume will appeal to scholars and researchers working across the fields of higher education, sociology of education, educational psychology, and student affairs.

This volume focuses on individual and collective practices of creativity, embodiment and movement as acts of self-care and wellbeing. Creative Expression and Wellbeing in Higher Education positions creative expression as an important act for professionals working in higher education, as a way to connect, communicate, practice activism or simply slow down. Through examples as diverse as movement through dance and exercise, expression through drawing, writing or singing and creating objects with one’s hands, the authors share how individual and collective acts of creativity and movement enhance, support and embrace wellbeing, offering guidance to the reader on how such creative expression can be adopted as self-care practice. This book highlights how connection to hand, body, voice and mind has been imperative in this process for expression, fl ow and engagement with self and wellbeing practices. Self-care and wellbeing are complex at the best of times. In higher education, these are actions that are constantly being grappled with personally, collectively and systematically. Designed to support readers working in higher education, this book will also be of great interest to professionals and researchers.

Teachers can’t teach effectively if they’re demotivated and exhausted; and they shouldn’t they have to! A Little Guide for Teachers: Teacher Wellbeing and Self-Care explains how wellbeing is essential to effective teaching, and gives teachers practical tools to take back control of the classroom. The Little Guide for Teachers series is little in size but BIG on all the support and inspiration you need to navigate your day to day life as a teacher. · Authored by experts in the field · Easy to dip in-and-out of · Interactive activities encourage you to write into the book and make it your own · Fun engaging illustrations throughout · Read in an afternoon or take as long as you like with it!