Friday Fragments, April 2
Women in the academy, building instructor-student relationships & mental wellness education.
What I’m reading…
Why Are There So Few Women Full Professors? is an interesting - if slightly depressing - read about the challenge women academic face. One section that stood out for me was when the author (Dr. Kimberly Hamlin) noted that the challenges women academics face increase over time, rather than getting easier once children are no longer new babies, as “care for growing children often collides with care for elders.” This sandwiching of caretaking duties - between children who still need quite a lot of attention and grandparents who start to need more assistance - falls, unsurprisingly, on women.
Within the academy — perhaps more so than other fields requiring an advanced degree such as law, medicine, or business — the burden of caregiving falls on women who generally do not have the financial means to hire additional help.
Elon’s Center for Engaged Learning shared earlier this week the below excerpt from a plenary session at the Gardner Institute's Virtual Gateway Course Experience Conference, in which Leo Lambert and Peter Felten discuss the importance of the relationships that contingent faculty build with their students.
In Mental Education, Not Just Mental Health the author explores how embracing mental wellness education can inform - and be informed by - mental health services on campuses.
[A] shift from mental health to mental education would prioritize teaching students critical thinking skills and self-management abilities in intrapersonal, interpersonal and social domains. We can apply lessons from stepped-care models of counseling center service delivery, which offer a hybrid of didactic instruction, experiential and interactive practice, and goal setting. Such programs may provide an infrastructure to build on mental education as a priority in higher education. The first step in the early stages of this aim must include broadening the narrative from a mental health frame to a mental education frame that attends to student struggles from a variety of perspectives in the campus community.