Being Kind to Ourselves: The EL-Well Initiative

The labour of caring for student wellbeing disproportionately falls to Educational Leadership (EL) faculty and particularly to those from equity-denied groups. This labour is often not recognized or supported. Being drained from emotional labour of supporting students’ wellbeing means that EL faculty cannot fully engage in educational leadership activities, nor optimally care for students.

The EL-Well initiative aims to cocreate much needed knowledge about factors that impact and support faculty wellbeing and develop community and sustainable resources. In this session, we will share about the initiative’s work so-far and invite participants to contribute to the building knowledge base and to identify what we want the EL-Well’s activities to look like in the new year.

Through conversational activities, we will identify barriers to and facilitators for our wellbeing collectively and individually.

We will gather in small groups to discuss the potential upcoming wellbeing workshop series topics:

• Compassion fatigue: Supporting students without burning out
• Resilience: Coming back from setbacks
• Rest as resistance
• Teaching from the margins: Experiences of faculty from equity-denied groups
• Supporting your wellbeing without losing on your teaching evaluations
• Artificial wellbeing? Exploring how technological changes impact EL faculty wellbeing