The Power Of Storytelling in Improving Students’ Emotional Well-Being

Abstract

The emotional well-being of students in the higher education space as a subject of the research forms is an important part of the research both in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and as well as before and after the pandemic. One of the dimensions of research is students’ emotional well-being in performance-oriented curricula. Performance-orientated curricula include the acquisition of interdisciplinary competencies that can reduce students’ subjective indicators of emotional well-being. In turn, storytelling as a method of pedagogical support has confirmed its effectiveness. Therefore, the research focus of this study is students who are studying in one of the programs of the performance-orientated subgroup; the study context is formed by the period of the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the research is to identify the effectiveness of storytelling as a method of pedagogical support in promoting students’ emotional well-being. This article presents the results of a case study in one higher education institution in Latvia. Qualitative approach has been selected for the research. Once a week during four-month period, 12 participants shared stories about their current issues. Session transcripts were encoded and then analysed in the qualitative data processing program NVivo 12. The results of the research were interpreted within the framework of the theory of self-determination. The transcripts of the sessions identified all the indicators formulated within the theory of self-determination: competence, relatedness, and autonomy, which were improved using storytelling. The results suggest that study courses on stress and emotional burnout management should also be included at the higher education level, which would allow to increase students’ skills to manage uncertainty situations. This study is a small, but research-sensitive indicator for promoting student well-being.