Cultivating social well-being: (Re)discovering the impact of positive relationships

Long periods of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic had drastic consequences for the social well-being in academia. We were forced to learn, teach, and collaborate in restricted social environments, develop new daily routines, and find ways to stay engaged in teaching and scholarly projects. The pandemic work experience demonstrated to us the significance of social well-being, that is, “building and maintaining healthy relationships and having meaningful interactions with those around you” (Boston University, 2022, social well-being) on our overall well-being and level of engagement in our work.

We are reflecting on our experiences and the decisions we made in relation to social well-being as a faculty member and a graduate student who work at different institutions and have both changed workplaces and roles during the pandemic. The pandemic changed the way we think about personal and professional relationships and, as Canale et al. (2022) point out, has made the care for well-being “imperative” (p. 730). We created well-being routines that helped us rediscover what can make our work so impactful, unique, and rewarding: cultivating positive relationships and being in dialogue with our students, colleagues, mentors, and other scholars.

Well-being is a multidimensional concept that reaches far beyond our physical and mental health. Well-being includes environmental, financial, occupational, intellectual, spiritual, as well as a social dimension. In fact, the social dimension of well-being, which includes our experiences of positive relationships and positive interactions, is the strongest predictor of our overall perception of well-being (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). As instructors, it is critical to consider that learning and well-being are also interconnected. Our ability to engage in learning is affected by our overall sense of well-being, and, at the same time our learning experiences can also impact our sense of well-being (Keeling, 2014).

In addition, we lean on research on basic learning principles, such as on the relation between the social and emotional climate of the course and its impact on student learning (Ambrose et al., 2010; Cavanagh, 2016) and increasing scholarship on the positive relationship between perceptions of well-being and academic performance (Stanton et al., 2016).

In their national survey, which is conducted every semester, the American College Health Association collects data from undergraduate students on their habits and sense of well-being. Of course, there are many factors ranging from substance abuse to physical health conditions that impact students’ academic performance, and we just highlight a few factors here that might impact the social dimension of well-being. In the latest survey from Spring 2022, 37% of students are reporting that anxiety negatively impacts their academic performance, 27% report a negative impact because of depression, and 43% of students report stress as an impediment to academic performance. More than 53% of students also reported feeling lonely, which is slightly down from 55% in 2021, but has been consistent over time.

Calling on colleges and universities to integrate “health into all aspects of campus culture,” the Okanagan Charter (The International Health Promoting Universities & Colleges Network, 2015) is paving a new path to reconsidering the connection between well-being and learning and to make health promotion in all its facets a core value of our institutions. A few higher education institutions in the United States and Canada have developed toolkits for instructors to support well-being in their learning environments, and we have drawn inspiration from the Simon Fraser University Resource Library on “Wellbeing in Learning Environments” (2023) and their approaches to intentionally and proactively integrating well-being into learning environments.

We integrated well-being-focused practices directed at supporting positive relationships into our interactions with students and colleagues. Our discoveries connect the affordances of online communication and interaction to both our own scholarly work as a faculty member and graduate student as well as to our teaching and interactions with undergraduate students.

A critical discovery for our scholarly engagement has been the opportunity to find a sense of belonging in different communities that emerged as virtual spaces. The transition to virtual events has opened up opportunities to explore topics and communities that would have otherwise not been accessible due to travel time and cost. Virtual collaborations have also added new opportunities for creativity and information sharing in that Zoom allows us to work with colleagues to add ideas to a shared whiteboard or to synchronously annotate a text, for example, during interactive workshops and breakout group sessions at online/hybrid conferences.

Participating in virtual groups new to us, outside of established conference meetings, and connecting with colleagues in different parts of the United States and the world has led to a sense of belonging in the discipline that has motivated a new purpose and curiosity about our discipline. Examples are the virtual reading and writing groups and the virtual conference of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the German Curriculum group. Another example is one of the author's participation in a new collaborative project with a European research group on the representation of hunting in German literature and art. These virtual events have offered valuable opportunities to expand our professional networks and build upon our own research agendas.

Most importantly, collaborations with geographically dispersed colleagues are now more manageable—and enjoyable—due to virtual meetings, and these virtual interactions have allowed us to engage with our professional interests in new ways and outside of typical structures. For example, in a research project about environmental justice in German curricula, we codesigned an instructional sequence and cotaught it virtually in a colleague's class at a third institution. The pandemic experience has normalized that we can visit each other's classes via Zoom, contribute to a colleague's class, and connect with students at a different institution.

Some instructional practices that emerged during the transition to remote teaching have benefitted our learning environments and continue to add value. The practices include the use of digital tools for collaboration and other practices that foreground social connection. Students and faculty likely never experienced the importance of digital media and literacy learning as intensely across courses as during the pandemic, and we benefit from our familiarity with a range of digital tools today.

Novo et al. (2020) found a direct relationship between students’ class participation and their perceptions of well-being, and integrating the digital tools we discovered during COVID into our in-person interactions with students can be a way to provide more opportunities for participation. When designing tasks for the German classroom, for instance, we include more genres and digital resources, such as Google JamBoard, QR codes for group activities, Flip (formerly flipgrid), online dictionaries, blogs, or Google Docs. Simon Fraser University's resource library on “Wellbeing in Learning Environments” (2023) provides a list of additional digital tools that can support student collaboration and well-being.

In addition to in-person meetings, our students continue to take advantage of virtual office hours, which increase the availability of instructors and remove some barriers, such as getting to the office or the awkwardness of an in-person meeting for learners. Research indicates that office hours can be critical for increasing student–faculty interaction, and time and location are a frequent barrier for students’ attendance (Griffin et al., 2014). We also provide our students with a transparent outlook on what to expect during office hours to ease the possible stress they might feel. We help them understand the importance of their individual meeting, the broad range of topics we can address as part of our mentoring agenda and enable them to prepare for the meeting. Towards the beginning of the semester, we have found that virtual office hours led to an increase in attendance, especially when sending out the Zoom link to students a few hours ahead of time as a reminder. We also found that using Microsoft's booking site made it easy for students to book brief 15-minute appointments with us without having to exchange emails and allowing students to select a time from the booking calendar that would work for them. Office hour attendance might not directly correlate with enrollment numbers or grades, but we find that office hours are another tool for us to build relationships.

Other instructional practices we have implemented to foreground social connectedness and students’ sense of belonging include frequent check-ins (Stanton et al., 2016; Simon Fraser University, 2023) with students, for example, by using memes such as “Welche Katze bist du heute?,” explicit conversations about resources and sense of belonging (a module with local resources added to our Learning Management System [Canvas]), and more intentional focus on integrating students’ lived experiences and self-reflections into assignments. Addy et al. (2021) demonstrate how the implementation of a systematic check-in survey with students can positively impact the relationship of instructors and students that bears the potential to shift our learners’ perception of how instructors recognize them: as a person rather than a number (p. 2). The positive relationships we aim to cultivate in our learning environments can ultimately contribute to a sense of belonging for our students, which might support student retention and graduation (Romero, 2018).

Reflecting on the disruption to our well-being over the last few years, we have discovered how much we value social connectedness, and we have found ways to address social well-being both in terms of our scholarly engagement and our teaching practices. We are emerging from the pandemic experience as more reflective practitioners who make more intentional choices about integrating practices that support student well-being as well as our own well-being. We have found that these practices help us—and our students—see the whole human.