Navigating Tensions and Transitions in Higher Education


Book Description

With a focus on skills development, this book provides guidance on how to navigate transitions between career stages in higher education and how to maintain wellbeing in the process. In a fast-paced and ever-changing environment, a career path in higher education can demand rapid transition. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the kinds of transitions one may face in higher education and how to navigate them successfully while focusing on wellbeing and self-care. Centred around first-person accounts, the chapters illustrate the key issues around transitions and their impacts and provide suggestions for how to adapt through self-care. The authors offer insights from their own personal experiences, enabling the reader to develop an action plan of their own or to share with and guide students and early career mentees. The tools and strategies outlined in the book make up a library of resources that can be called upon at any stage of the journey. Written with all career stages in mind, this book will be an essential resource for new and experienced researchers alike.




Supporting and Promoting Wellbeing in the Higher Education Sector


Book Description

This book provides innovative, practical tools to help combat declining personal wellbeing in the higher education workplace. Divided into two sections, the book looks at wellbeing from institutional and individual levels. It outlines a framework for how wellbeing in the higher education workplace can be evaluated and clearly sets out initiatives for what can be done to improve faculty wellbeing. The book also explores issues such as the once vocational nature of academia, the extent to which institutions can provide allied health care and examines initiatives that individual faculty members have introduced for themselves. Representing new ideas, perspectives and a variety of approaches to supporting and promoting wellbeing in the higher education workplace, this book will be of interest to academic staff as well as professional development personnel in higher education.




Exploring Time as a Resource for Wellness in Higher Education


Book Description

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.




Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education


Book Description

This book provides an evidence-based approach to sustainable self-care, anchoring these strategies in individual academic workers’ core personal values. It teaches readers how to use their values to leverage self-care strategies into a workable, individualized, and effective map to wellness. Working in the demanding environment of higher education can leave little time for self-care, yet making space for wellness and self-care is essential to creating a creative and innovative environment for academic work. This book shows how to create and successfully implement realistic self-care plans. By identifying core values and using these to develop individualized self-care plans, Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education pushes back against a one-size-fits-all approach while also discussing the role of self-care in academic labor activism and providing strategies for readers to become advocates for better self-care practices within their zones of influence. Designed to provide academic workers with the skills they need to develop workable and sustainable self-care plans, this book is an invaluable resource for students and professionals working in all areas of higher education.




Understanding Wellbeing in Higher Education of the Global South


Book Description

This edited book gives voice to previously unheard narratives on wellbeing in higher education and provides novel implications for higher education policy and practice. Offering contextually sensitive and culturally responsive perspectives, the book problematizes wellbeing in higher education as it is currently theorized in the Global North, bringing to the fore perspectives and multi-disciplinary insights from the Global South region. Chapters present an alternative conceptualization of wellbeing in higher education based on stories, perceptions, and experiences of university students, faculty, and leaders from the Global South region, challenging a reductionist view of wellbeing and embracing its complexity, multi-dimensionality and context-sensitivity. The authors present an alternative non-Western approach to thinking, researching, and doing wellbeing in higher education, offering clear guidelines to support teachers, educational researchers, and leaders in fostering a more holistic teaching and learning experience. This volume will stimulate policy development and enactment, as well as university-wide interventions and practices that can make a difference in the lives of students in higher education.




Passion and Purpose in the Humanities


Book Description

This book takes readers on a journey into the experiences, struggles and triumphs of early career researchers in the humanities. In the spirit of guiding emerging scholars and researchers in higher education, the edited volume highlights lived experiences of researchers and ways to navigate the struggles and values of research in the humanities. Featuring 20 unique essays by emergent scholars who weave their personal lives into their research passions, this book offers a window into the experience of researchers in both professional and personal developments. The chapters are accompanied by letters of encouragement and advice from senior researchers who reflect on the role that research has played in their lives. Each chapter further engages with the literature relevant to the topic, firmly grounding the work in the academic field. The book also includes a section on how to use the book, providing prompts for discussion and reflection that encourage self-guided exploration and collaborative reading. Providing inspiration and deep insight, this book is a unique resource for postgraduate students, advanced degree and early career researchers, as well as their supervisors, in the humanities and beyond.







Creative Expression and Wellbeing in Higher Education


Book Description

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.




College Success


Book Description




Multi-dimensional Transitions of International Students to Higher Education


Book Description

International students experience multiple and multi-dimensional educational and life transitions: moving to a new country, moving to a new educational system and moving to higher educational degree programmes. Within these transitions, they experience differences in the social and organisational cultures, languages, and interpersonal expectations, realities and relationships. Their transitions also lead to, and interact with, transitions of professionals, home students and their families. Multi-dimensional Transitions of International Students to Higher Education provides up-to-date literature, research and theoretical constructs that underpin international students’ transitions to Higher Education. This book will help you to understand the opportunities, issues, social-emotional-psychological dimensions and evidence-based interventions that are vital to support an individual through these educational and life transitions. Split into four sections, topics include: Theoretical Underpinning Research in Different Contexts Impact of Educational Practice and Social Systems Interventions and Strategies Used to Enhance International Students’ Affective, Behavioural and Cognitive Transition Experiences This book is essential reading for professionals, students and policy makers and provides significant research insights to academics and researchers in the area of education, psychology and sociology.