Why Wellbeing in the
Teaching and Learning Environment?


In the United Kingdom (UK) and internationally universities are facing a crisis of student wellbeing (Macaskill, 2012, Mikalajūnaitė 2019). Many studies have argued the importance of considering wellbeing as it affects the whole students population (Houghton and Anderson, 2017; Marshall et al., 2019), reinforcing the need for an urgent action within the sector. Stressors such as academic workload, high level expectancy of academic performance (Kadison and DiGeronimo, 2004; Levecque et al., 2017) and financial burden (Denovan and Macaskill, 2017) combined with changes in lifestyle (Kruisselbrink Flatt, 2013; Deasy et al. 2014; Wonkhe, 2019) are some of the reasons for the current situation (Pidgeon et al., 2014).

There are many arguments for developing universities as environments that sustain and enhance student wellbeing. Student wellbeing is integral to learning (Bücker et al., 2018). Poor student wellbeing can impact academic achievement (El Ansari and Stock, 2010; Geertshuis, 2019), and a lack of resilience to protect wellbeing can limit a student’s learning capacity and engagement with consequences for continuation and attainment (Turner, Holdsworth and Scott-Young, 2017; McIntosh and Shaw, 2017).

On a more philosophical level, higher education is about the development of ‘a whole, integrated person’, (Keeling, 2014: 144), preparing students to deal with an unknown future as argued by Barnett (2012:65). While some of these ambitions may be undermined by the marketization of Higher Education (McCulloch, 2009), good teaching and learning is a process of ‘becoming’ and development of the individual agency, necessary for longer-term wellbeing (Sabri, 2011).


Student Wellbeing and the
Teaching and Learning Environment


Students’ overall experience in Higher Education is highly impacted by the teaching and learning environment (Barden and Caleb, 2019; Baik, et al., 2019). Such an environment plays a key role in students’ learning, but also in their personal wellbeing and ability to flourish and become engaged citizens (Hammond, 2004; Okanagan Charter, 2015).

Research indicates that teaching practices and learning environments contribute to experiences of wellbeing (Fernandez et al., 2016, Harward, 2016; Riva et al., 2018; Zandvliet, Stanton, Dhaliwal, 2019). The different components that constitute the learning process can have either a positive or a negative impact on health and wellbeing and there is evidence from the primary, secondary schools and Higher Education settings that classroom culture, course design, curriculum, assessment, physical, virtual spaces and teachers and tutors themselves may all have the ability to impact student wellbeing (Di Placito-De Rango, 2018; Stanton, et al., 2016).

Therefore it is crucial that we enable a dialogue on how we create and sustain learning settings and a curriculum able to foster a wellbeing-positive learning experience. Our Wellbeing Library wishes to play a key role in fostering such dialogue and in offering a real support to students and staff who want to sustain and/or create wellbeing mindful T&L environments .

Ultimately, sustaining the embedding of wellbeing in teaching and learning environments reinforces the ‘whole university approach’ to wellbeing championed in the University Mental Health Chart as a ‘multi–stranded approach which recognises that all aspects of university life can support and promote mental health and wellbeing’ (Hugh and Spanner, 2019, p.10), leading to the development of a truly care-rooted University experience.


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