Understanding Wellbeing: Cultivating a Safe Space for Inter- and Trans- Disciplinary Exploration
Summary
Professor Elena Riva shares insights from her extensive experience in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinary. After receiving a grant from IATL where she developed workshops to explore how chemistry can be understood through multimedia, Elena went on to create three IATL modules: Thinking Water; Genetics: Science and Society; and Understanding Wellbeing Theory and Practice.
In this case study, Elena specifically focuses on Understanding Wellbeing, which seeks to engage a more holistic, historic and academic picture of wellbeing. Following a co-creation process undertaken with Warwick students, Understanding Wellbeing was subsequently developed into a HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Report) accredited online module. This module, open to all students across Warwick, also allows students to earn points towards a Warwick Award.
Elena reflects on how interdisciplinary work requires the cultivation of a safe space for students, staff and community members alike to share their knowledge and bring their full selves to the experience.
Students Say...
Following the feedback that Elena received from students saying that
“they wish they could have taken this module before in their studies,”
Elena and a team of co-creation student officers developed the module into the online version.
The fact that over 7,000 Warwick students have taken the online module in the past two and half years, shows the module’s popularity and success.
Students’ assessment work and ideas to improve wellbeing in higher education has been showcased and “they have been successfully shared with the wellbeing services” at Warwick as well.
Professor Elena Riva
Professor Elena Riva is Head of Department at the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), and, until becoming Head, convened the IATL module Understanding Wellbeing Theory and Practice as well as Genetics: Science and Society and Thinking Water.
Among many other awards, she has been a recipient of the Warwick Teaching Excellence Award (2018 and 2020) and of the prestigious National Teaching Fellowship (2023). Elena is Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academic (PFHEA), fellow of the Warwick Institute for Engagement (WIE) and alumna of the Warwick International Higher Education Academy (WIHEA).
Her work focuses on participatory, co-created pedagogic practices to sustain staff and student wellbeing in higher education.
See Elena’s full bio.
Highlights
“A safe space is a reclaiming of wellbeing as an experiential, social, emotional, and truly academic experience, and rebuilding this knowledge with the students.”
“I think the safe space needs to be achieved in all interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary modules; it’s not necessarily specific to wellbeing."
“When you walk into an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary space, you have to admit that you aren’t an expert anymore.”
Further Resources
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