Curricula Integration of Student Wellbeing Resources: Exploring Australian and New Zealand perspectives

Together with colleagues from UNSW, Edith Cowan University and Victoria University of Wellington, I was successful in obtaining a hjghly competitive HERDSA grant to conduct student wellbeing research

Studies addressing student wellbeing have identified the need for a ‘whole of university’ response.  While, professional services in the tertiary sector have significantly enhanced their capacity to identify and address student success and wellbeing resources, leading pedagogic research have identified the challenges of integrating student wellbeing and student success tools into ‘the curriculum environment’. The Curricula Integration of Student Wellbeing Resources project will compare how student wellbeing resources have been integrated among academic and professional staff and into the teaching curriculum in three Australasian universities (Edith Cowan University, Victoria University of Wellington, and the University of New South Wales). Building upon established communities of practice and internal studies from each tertiary setting, our project seeks to consolidate and extend previous human ethics approved studies into a comprehensive framework for comparison across three tertiary settings.

This study has three interrelated aims: (1) investigate how academic and professional staff understand student wellbeing resources; (2) consider how wellbeing resources can be integrated into the curriculum and; (3) incorporate students views on how these resources can be more accessible, relevant and useful to students.

Research into the pedagogy and institutional practices of Student Wellbeing is a growing field of inquiry which aligns with the HERDSA SIG Academic Development in a number of ways. Our existing community of practice has successfully demonstrated how academic and professional staff from across all faculties and services of the university can collaborate with each other to introduce and develop resources that support ‘academic development, professional development, teaching and learning support, and similar activities to support academic staff’. Prominent members of our existing community are world leaders in theory building, particularly in the application of self-determination theory to student wellbeing curriculum integration. The SW CoP has already begun to build national and international networks in this space, including members from partner universities (ECU, VUW, Syd) and keynote presentations from leading scholars such as Chi Baik. 

The inspiration for the present application came from the positive response to a Conference paper presented by this group at ISSOTL which documented staff perceptions of student wellbeing resources.  The discussion revealed that, while most universities have now established extensive student wellbeing resources, few had formed truly representative and SOTL informed communities of practice like ours.