Creative Self Reflection and Wellbeing at the York St John Talk About Teaching Conference
Tomorrow is the York St John Talk About Teaching: Exploring Mental Health and Wellbeing in HE Conference 2023 #TAT23, where for the first time since before the Covid pandemic colleagues will meet in person on the York St John Campus for a programme of talks and workshops celebrating and exploring teaching.
“As highlighted by the 2022 TASO report, mental health and wellbeing are increasingly urgent areas of concern in HE, requiring critical, creative and holistic approaches across the sector and beyond. This year’s conference invites YSJ staff and students to tackle these issues head on, and consider how we might address this growing challenge on a local, regional as well as national level.”
I was asked to contribute a session to the day, and after a hectic past 6 months beginning my PhD, teaching, and planning research, one striking pattern in my conversations with both staff and students has been the prevalence of burnout and imposter syndrome in academia at this time. Focusing on the wellbeing of staff, researchers and associates is not only essential to providing a good service and the best environment for our students in which to learn, but it’s also important in managing sickness, retention, avoiding compassion fatigue, and ensuring that in the climate of cost of living crises, strikes, and career pressures, people want to stay in their roles and enjoy their work. It’s a challenge in any career, but the pressure on teachers currently is well understood.
“Using arts-based approaches can enhance the quality and depth of reflection. When teachers engage with arts-based reflection, it has the potential to reveal valuable information about personal and contextual resources on which they can draw when elements of their work become a threat. Providing teachers with strategies and time to be reflective such as opportunities for creating collage with colleagues may help to support teachers' wellbeing and resilience. Finding avenues to build teachers' agency, job satisfaction and sense of belonging may help to retain some teachers who may be at risk of leaving the profession…reflective and arts-based tools [enable] teachers to put a name to the challenging elements that they perceived were associated with their roles.” (Barton, G. McKay, L. 2018)
My background as an artist and art psychotherapist informs how I approach conducting my research, but also how I approach staying well whilst I do it. Higher education, teaching and academia are notoriously high pressure environments, with many individuals and even research backing up the idea that over the course of a PhD people simply expect to struggle with their mental health. Teaching is no different. In my years of experience working in mental health, teachers form a very obvious large set of the people I’ve worked with due to the pressures of their careers. It is the dual focus of art practice and mental health that has led me to incorporate play and art making into every aspect of my work. An important note here is that art making doesn’t have to be creating award winning final pieces or trying to create art with a capital A - in fact for me, trying to remove perfectionism from the equation is part of the appeal. It is for this reason that in workshops I’ll often employ modelling clay and plasticine, basic and rudimentary materials, short time windows and working with others - sometimes constraints and the permission to make a mess or be childish can allow us to lower our barriers, emerge from under our carefully crafted professional personas, and ask questions of ourselves and our environments that otherwise go unexplored.
Creative self-reflection for wellbeing: Talk About Teaching 2023
Format: Workshop
Facilitator: Samantha Goddard
Join art psychotherapist and PhD student Samantha Goddard in a practical, collaborative workshop to explore creative tools and practices that can help us reflect on boundaries, burnout and building personal resilience. As burnout and mental health become increasing priorities for students and staff at every stage of the HE experience, what learning can we learn from creativity and mental health research, and borrow from psychotherapeutic practice? In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to take some protected space to play and prioritise the valuable reflective practice that so often gets bumped from the bottom our pressured to do lists. By the end of the session, we will have shared experiences and started to build a toolbox of small strategies you can use to build your own self-awareness and improve your own sense of wellbeing, or to use in learning and teaching.
The traditional concept of reflective practice is that it sits at a structured cycle of self-observation and self-evaluation, for continuous learning. In professional practice, the focus here is often on Continuous Professional Development, improving our efficiency and skill in delivering whatever it is we do. In teaching, we may be thinking about what we do in the classroom or our lectures, why we do what we do, and whether it works - in order to enhance our own knowledge, and to develop inquiry skills and theories. For many of us it might conjure up uncomfortable memories of recording and reviewing your own performance, or feel like a dry procedure that tugs at the worst aspects of our imposter syndrome. This can feel like an onerous process that we sometimes don’t have time for, but aside from improving our skills as practitioners, reflective practice can also provide space to bring more of ourselves in the picture. A holistic self reflective practice might also encourage us to explore our boundaries, resistance and challenges, unconscious emotions and dynamics in our career - and also provide space for play, divergent thinking and discovery.
“Research suggests many educators are challenged to incorporate self-reflection into daily routines. Most often, self-reflection is practiced as a cognitive and text-based activity…The most common self-reflection formats we have encountered, as both educators and learners, is the practice of recording one's thoughts in a journal, log, or diary. Yet, we know that confining learning to the cognitive domain will not fully engage all learners, or the whole learner. So, it is not surprising that self-reflection often ends up occurring sporadically, usually in response to an extreme (positive or negative) experience or in response to a peak of emotion, instead of as a tool for short and long-term growth…
Exposing educators to first-person action research under the guise of an arts-based approach offers an alternative means to building a more reflective and reflexive practice. As we create deeper senses of self(ves) for our practice we further support our students who have the most to gain from enlightened practitioners.” (Bautista, D. Clarke, A. 2017)
My workshop introduces attendees to exercises and tools they might use in their work and personal life, drawn from my previous research and experiences in the mental health field. Self reflection alone, however, is no panacea for toxic systems that ask too much of us or put pressure on individuals struggling to make ends meet on low pay, insecure contracts, or under relentless pressure. To borrow a term from Johann Hari’s new book Stolen Focus, “Cruel Optimism” tells us that adjustments to individual practice alone can often take a reductive, individualistic approach to the barriers and challenges we face in staying well. Individual changes and awareness are an important start, but not enough. Our environments, schedules and leaders need to prioritise wellbeing and listen to causes of burnout and stress.
That being said, some bits and pieces from my ever expanding tool/play box (literally - over the past decade I’ve built up a chest of books, art materials and resources I turn to to aid my own reflective practice) include games and prompt cards from The School of Life, Iniva Emotional Learning Cards and packs, images and artwork for photo elicitation and discussion, clay and Play Doh, creative writing tools (such as Haikubes), paints and collage materials. What works for one person may not be the best tool for another, but having a variety and being willing to give it a go is key to finding what works for you. Additionally, creative self reflection is a practice that is best employed regularly, such as more traditional methods of discussion, text based analysis and journalling.
If you’re attending the conference, I’ll look forward to seeing you there and to enthusing about protected time for reflection and play. Though it may feel like a luxury, or even trivial to cynics or those who feel they were ‘never good at art’, finding ways to explore topics and challenges in arts based ways can contribute to both your mental and physical health. Much justification for building this into your work can be found in the work of Babette Rothschild and her book Help for the Helper, and Gabor Maté’s new book The Myth of Normal. Compassion fatigue and burnout have profound implications for longevity, immune health, mental wellbeing and systems change, not just on improving our outcomes in education. Space to articulate ourselves in new ways can also bring us closer together as colleagues, and provide a new dialogue for facing challenges and working through difficult to discuss topics as groups. I’m looking forward to following this up with some feedback from the session.
What comes up for you when you think about putting the play back into your practice, and what might it be trying to tell you?
Some Further Reading from my Workshop and References
Aesop Arts Enterprise with a Social Purpose; http://www.ae-sop.org
Art Therapy (Creative Therapies in Practice Series) by Dave Edwards
Bautista, D. Clarke, A. 2017. Critical reflection and arts based action research for the educator self. Canadian Journal of Action Research, 18:1, 52-70.
Beauchamp, C. (2015). Reflection in teacher education: Issues emerging from a review of current literature. Reflective Practice: International and Multidisci- plinary Perspectives, 16(1), 123e141.
Chang, M. L. (2009). An appraisal perspective of teacher burnout: Examining the emotional work of teachers. Educational Psychology Review, 2, 193e218.
Helping the Helper: The Psychophysiology of Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma, Babette Rothschild
Joy Schaverien in The Changing Shape of Art Therapy, Andrea Gilroy, Gary McNeilly
Korthagen, F., & Vasalos, A. (2005). Levels of reflection: Core reflection as a means to enhance professional development. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 11(1), 47e71.
L. McKay, G. Barton. Teaching and Teacher Education 75 (2018)
Moffat, A., Ryan, M., & Barton, G. (2016). Reflexivity and self care for creative fa-cilitators: Stepping outside the circle. Studies in Continuing Education, 38(1),
Public Health England Arts for Health and Wellbeing Evaluation Framework; http://www.ae-sop.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/PHE-Aesop-Arts-in-health-evaluation-framework.pdf
Skaalvik, E., & Skaalvik, S. (2010). Teacher self-efficacy and teacher burnout: A study of relations. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 1059e1069.
Skaalvik, E., & Skaalvik, S. (2017). Motivated for teaching? Associations with school goal structure, teacher self-efficacy, job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion.
Skovholt, T. M., & Trotter-Mathison, M. (2011). The resilient practitioner: Burnout prevention and self-care strategies for counselors, therapists, teachers, and health professionals (2nd ed.). New York: Taylor and Francis.
Stolen Focus and Lost Connections, Johann Hari
The All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing Inquiry and other resources; https://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk/appg-inquiry/
The Arts Council England National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing; http://www.artshealthandwellbeing.org.uk
The British Association of Art Therapists; https://www.baat.org
The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate
Vesely, A. K., Saklofske, D. H., & Nordstokke, D. W. (2014). EI training and pre-service teacher wellbeing. Personality and Individual Differences, 65, 81e85.
