To mark Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, we round up some of our posts on mental health and wellbeing in higher education that view this issue from different aspects – academic research, early-career scholars, the use of trigger warnings in the classroom, compassionate education development practice, and mental health-related accommodations for students
Writing in times of crisis
Esra Ozyurek ponders the role and work of an academic during the lockdown.
The Swiss knives of academia
As the mental health of both students and staff garners increased attention, Maud Borie focuses on the situation faced by PhD students and early-career scholars and asks: with all the different roles they play, is there time to slow down?
Is there a place for trigger or content warnings in HE? – Parts 1 and 2
Ellis Saxey discusses the place of content warnings in reducing, not academic difficulty, but those psychological challenges that students can face which don’t necessarily contribute to their ability to progress in their learning. Lee-Ann Sequeira considers an alternative view – that trigger warnings may not be the solution to issues surrounding mental wellbeing in the classroom.
Creating compassionate spaces in higher education
In a time of change and uncertainty, four academic developers from different disciplines, Jenni Carr, Natasha Taylor, Catriona Cunningham, and Jennie Mills, revisit Haynes’ and Macleod-Johnstone’s powerful paper Stepping through the daylight gate: compassionate spaces for learning in higher education and aim to make connections with how compassion plays an integral role in their practice.
We need to disentangle merit from mental health
Drawing on social justice and critical pedagogy, Kat Higgins argues against a broader scepticism towards mental health-related accommodations in HE where they are often viewed as a get-out clause.
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This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.
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Image credt: Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
