I am a founding member of the EF faculty aligned Community of Practice (CoP) - Student Wellbeing, and have been actively involved with my colleagues since 2019 in exploring different ways of monitoring and enhancing student wellbeing across UNSW. In mid-2021 I was approached to become an academic Co-Lead of the Student Wellbeing CoP, which currently consists of 75 academic and professional staff across the faculties and divisions of UNSW. Our aim has been to maintain an inclusive community of academic and professional staff that shares practice, supports one another and collaborates to identify student wellbeing resources at UNSW and across the sector, evaluate their practical application and scalability and where appropriate to integrate these resources into the UNSW curriculum and community.

Since assuming leadership in mid-2022, the CoP has had amazing engagement with external stakeholders in 2022 with Student Wellbeing CoP member, John Randal from Victoria University of Wellington - Te Herenga Waka delivering a presentation at Student Wellbeing and mental health at our September CoP meeting. Further, two CoP members, Gavin Mount and Linda Ferrington, facilitated a workshop on “How to Build a Student Wellbeing/Success Community of Practice” in Canada at ISSOTL22 - 2nd-5th November 2022. These have been fantastic opportunities to engage and collaborate with the wider teaching community.

The transition of leadership prompted me to collaborate with my co-lead Dr Chris Maloney and Melanie Cross (Project Officer) to assess and reorient the direction of the CoP. The new goals of the CoP are to support the creation of resources for the wider teaching community and maintain opportunities to share teaching practice and discuss topical issues relating to student wellbeing in a safe environment. Student wellbeing is an ongoing priority at UNSW. We believe that engagement with internal and external stakeholders will increase capacity for research, dissemination of knowledge and engagement with student wellbeing more widely and without stigma.

My focus in leadership of this CoP is to normalise the embedding of student mental health and wellbeing into the curriculum, and create a collaborative space for colleagues to address the wider challenges around student wellbeing in a range of teaching contexts. I see education as a holistic process and place student wellbeing at the centre of my teaching practice. Social connectedness and belonging are positively associated with mental and physical health and I believe supporting all these aspects lead to enhancement of student experience, success and ultimately student retention.