 Good morning everyone and welcome to our next exciting session. I'm Lynne Taylorson and I have the pleasure of chairing this next session and I'm delighted to introduce Jennifer Lindsdale and she's going to be telling us about using creativity to support mental well-being in education. So it's around a 20 minute session so Jennifer's going to present for about 15 minutes and then we'll have time to address your questions and your comments. So please pop in questions you've got in chat and we'll get around to as many of those as we can. So without further ado Jennifer over to you. Hi everyone it's great to kind of speak today so as Lynne says I'm looking at creativity and how that supports mental well-being in education. All my research kind of over the last three years is developed through initially my masters in arts and education practices and now moving into kind of just using this on my own and thinking about how I develop this and eventually hopefully a PhD. So this is kind of developed over three years and just as a bit of a background and overview on who I am and what I did. I studied at Birmingham City University my masters in art education practices and throughout all of that my interest was really around mental health and education just from a personal standpoint. Personally for me it's about further education so I work in post 16 I work in a sixth one college in Birmingham at the moment and started out looking at students because I think I found what I wasn't expecting when I moved into my first teaching role was that so many students are now impacted by mental health and so many students struggle on a day-to-day basis and quite often actually struggle to discuss that and know how to discuss that or even know how to deal with that. So I started looking at students initially now what actually happened naturally within that is I felt like I needed to progress more into staff start looking at staff because ultimately if we don't help our staff in education we can't fully help our students so we can't actually provide them the support if we aren't getting supported ourselves so we impact them obviously as you know every day our adolescents can see what is wrong with us so you can tell if you're in a bad mood my students say to me all of the time when I walk into the classroom and they go oh no Jen's in a bad mood today so they can tell and that impacts them which could then also impact their ability to speak to you about their mental health so this is kind of the journey that I went on over that kind of period I started out by looking at how the Bauhaus school model is still used in education despite that being from the 1940s post-war kind of era in Germany and what impact that potentially has on education I then looked into students and did some action research with students and then what I'm talking to you about today specifically is the staff well being in education and then moved on to obviously looking at those staff and then looking at how we can use this research and how we can develop this research to change hopefully the face of education and that's where the title came from these last three publications that I made of one person can change the world because one person can do enough to change that world so what I did essentially within my research was I used what we call the Warwickshire Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale which you can see on the screen at the moment it's a list of 14 positively worded statements that you measure yourself against none of the time rarely some of the time often all of the time and these are quite over to point scores basically what I got staff to do was fill this in at the beginning of the project and then again at the end of the project which was a three week period staff were then given a booklet of art therapy style tasks and techniques which focused on different emotions they went from more negative emotions and kind of developed into more positive emotions and I'll show you some of them on the next slide they repeated the questionnaire at the end and compared their results to see whether things had improved in terms of productivity mental well-being and really specific aspects like feeling confident feeling like they were interested in new things interested in new people and feeling like they were useful and optimistic about the future they were my main focus points I felt like from a personal aspect as a teacher and also from personal kind of developments over time as music students have basically been a student for my whole life was that actually they were the things that affected me the most and they were the things that I'd affect see and affect other people the most so these are just some of the examples of things that staff and students did in my projects so day one was about just creating an emotion wheel and starting to explore your emotions starting to explore your mental health and mental well-being and then moving on to things like designing postcards that you'll never send writing things that you feel like you needed to say to someone to be able to say like closed chapters okay it can express you and it can make you start to consider the way that things affect you and move forward with that and these developed over time as I say so staff had three weeks worth of these little tasks they were allowed to spend as long as they wanted on these I didn't mind whether you spent an hour two hours three hours of five minutes it was designed so that so staff did this of an evening and staff talked about this of an evening and thought about this of an evening um just to kind of close a book or close a day because what I felt like is if you get those emotions out of your day does that then help you to wake up the next day and start something new and not have things kind of branching over day to day stopping you from being able to sleep maybe stopping you in the morning from feeling motivated about your next working day so what I found actually was that every single member of staff who completed the study reported positive improvement in their mental health the lowest change was three points which is considered through the mental well-being scale to be genuine change and the highest was actually 50 which was a huge amount and a huge change in that individual person no participant lowered their scores on any individual question it stayed at least the same or improved and you can just see that on that data on the left hand side the most consistent improvement across the board were actually people feeling less negative about themselves and their abilities and all but one member of staff said they were able to feel like they could complete their daily tasks a little bit better which was really important for me because the impact of mental health therefore as I say impacts your students or your adolescents that you're working with specifically for me in this 16 to 19 kind of educational sector so that was the results the pink in the background on the results just as a point is what changed so that was the second and you can see that across the board so many changes some for some people they're huge amount of changes for some people they're small amount of changes and this was just a sample of the staff so I looked at five staff specifically in this there was a large arrange of people that took part in that so I'm now at a point where I was then at a point kind of reflecting on this data and I felt like yes I had an amazing amount of data but this quote just really stood out to me now is not the time to be shy or timid now is not the time to assume other teachers are doing it for you now is the time to act and ultimately I just felt like the data wasn't enough it's not enough there we're missing something in this kind of collection of research yes I've got numbers written down but I don't really have a huge amount else okay so maybe we needed more so I actually spent a huge range of time thinking and reflecting on my own understanding of art mental health and education through the past 20 years of me being an education and that was one person could change the world volume one so that was a reflective piece and then also started to think about other stories about from other people which was at one person can change the world volume too so part one was past present and future and this was my initial kind of opening of this project to reflect on my own mental health and my own understanding of mental health and my own impact within that and what that did to me while in education so there's some lovely little baby photographs there for me and that was my story I then started to discuss and talk about other people's stories so I went through and I interviewed I think it was around about 30 people in the end and all of us just discussed how mental health impacted them their own individual stories of how mental health impacted them as well as how creativity actually supported them I talked about things like mental health practitioners I talked about mental health first aiders we talked about bullying in the workplace we talked about workload we talked about events we talked about students we talked about a huge range of different things and what really stood out to me and I think what's really evident in this project is that everyone's story was different nobody has had the same experience with mental well-being and nobody has had the same experience in education all of them work slightly differently from then I'm now thinking and where I'm at at the moment is my next steps so what I want to start doing and I think what's important to start doing is start to engage with additional further education institutions as well as looking at primary secondary and higher education and discuss actually how important this is going to be in this new post-COVID world that was starting to enter the feedback on the right hand side is something that really stood out to me and I felt was really really important to know was that actually for some people it stopped being about consciously drawing every day it stopped being about sitting down and thinking about it actually it became something people were excited about people were excited to complete because it allowed you to transition from that work brain to your home life and it allowed you to release the emotions of that day and move forward these are my kind of main discussion points I suppose and what I am going to show you is my website that I've set up and that's new for people to get in contact with me because I really want to start developing this in terms of what actually have you been doing within lockdowns and within your time kind of over the last year and how much that is actually are a creative based because things like knitting or baking or crocheting which I think every person I interviewed had actually tried at least once how important are they to you and what impact did that actually have on you and that time and then specifically if you are a teacher how are you planning on continuing to move back into your teaching role and keep this up and how do we implement that in education and I'm starting to open this out into this kind of open education resource area where I want people to start talking to me and have conversations with me about building your own well-being toolkit creativity sport reading meditating whatever you're interested in as a basis all of it is creative in some way it's not just about using artwork or art therapy techniques although that's what I did personally in my own research it's about how we implement these into our day to day lives to support our own well-being as educators as staff in any role as students as anyone as we are whether we're at home and we're looking after children you know taking those five minutes out to do something is going to make such a huge difference thinking about yourself for just a couple of minutes a day so what I want people to do is start to take this opportunity and hopefully go away from today in this conference and start to think about how we build our own well-being tool kits these are some things that I did for the joy fe magazine just to show you so things like affirmations and making yourself affirmation badges for a day about how you offered your best self or you're excited for the next day or remembering that you're confident and you're resilient and you believe in yourself self care alphabets are really great to use I can send all of these things over to anyone who is interested if you wanted them to use so building a self care alphabet in 30 minutes so limit yourself to that time frame and then give yourself 30 minutes for each of these so things like eating something healthy being kind doing some exercise meditating or making lists of things that you love things that make you happy and those focus words are so important for you this is another goal page that I made as well but actually the quote I think is really relevant so no matter how many mistakes you make or how slow your progress you're still ahead of everyone who isn't trying be mindful of that I think mental well-being across every single business sector whether you're in education or not is having an impact on us at the moment and I think there's such variant changes of life over the last year is naturally going to do that so you're more than welcome and I please please please do follow me on Twitter email me pop onto my website this is just a quick screenshot of my website which is now live I made it live last week so it's brand new is there for you to come and talk to me I'm more than happy and I would like to start interviewing people again and I would like to start talking to people about their own personal experiences within my blog area here and I'm starting to release these interviews as well as an open education resource for people to look at and consider and explore so that's me I hope you enjoyed my presentation anyone has any questions please please please please send them over for me thank you so much Jennifer it was you know it resonated so much I'm glad you've gone back to that slide because there are so many people in chat I don't you know you've been busy presenting so you've not seen and seen the public comments who wanted you to put that slide back up so if you could please leave that there so because people are scribbling it down I mean personally I've been really resonated with me because I've been knitting one square at a time the little row and knit along just probably about a five inch square at a time I've done a double bed spread and it's been so amazing for mindfulness but the topic is has been really timely for everyone just looking across the chat particularly talking about the focus on staff well-being people said your quotes are very powerful the other thing that was really interesting is so many people asked is the survey open for everyone to access which is the WEM WBS and Lou Minecraft actually popped that in chat you know you know Lou from the organizing and steering committee she said she thought your presentation was amazing Chrissy wants to find out more and she's keen to chat with you so I'm going to put you in touch afterwards and people would just love to find out more about your work because it's so important so some really positive affirmations no particular questions so I mean I think you know if there's anything you'd like to leave a sort of a closing message there wasn't questions it was just wonderment at how fantastic it was and I think you've left people so much to look at with you know the email and the website and the blog that they're going to do that is there anything that they say that everyone's saying thank you so much anything that you wish you hadn't said or any advice for people who are going to be using this the survey maybe I think the most important thing with the survey is just being honest and also on the other side of things obviously specifically for me I'm an art teacher whatever graphics teacher and use art and design quite heavily in my life and I think what a lot of stuff we're worried about work but I can't draw or I don't do art and I've never done art and it's remembering it's not about that and actually if you're going to use the survey which obviously is readily available for people to use use it honestly and don't steer away from things you feel like you don't know how to do because all of us have learned something new in lockdown I think most of us have learned how to make banana bread or hay or knit or all these different things and don't be afraid to try those what we'll be going live on my website as well over the next couple of days is the art therapy booklet I actually used with staff so it's three weeks worth of those day-to-day different quotes and different kind of techniques you can use and you're more than welcome to download them and use them and have a little look at how that actually promotes yourself but just consciously thinking about and I think if people are interested in kind of exploring this please please please kind of get in contact with me but then also start to do things like mental well-being affirmations make yourself a pledge today to do something this week that is genuinely going to change your mental well-being for the better whether that's five minutes that you take for yourself or whether that's an hour where you decide to do some knitting or do some crocheting or go for a walk and take some photographs which again is a really simple creative task that so many of us have started doing and consciously think about within that time how that is actually helping you and what about that is helping you because as I say whether you're in education or not this will help in some way and creativity helps in some way and I think building my portfolio of interviews if people want to contact me and do it would be amazing and building that portfolio of interviews not only for education it's something that we can give to so many people even hand to the government and say look look at these stories and look at how this is impacting people we need to make genuine change in how we help that and how I think it's really powerful what you're saying about you know this is going to be brilliant for educators but also beyond education all other workplaces too it's you know it's just really really powerful so many people saying that they've taken little screenshots and they're really looking forward to exploring your website and that they are going to get in touch with you which I think is a fabulous sort of affirmation there's a friend of mine who's she's a textile artist and she she does classes but she encourages people to start with sketching I mean I take photographs because I couldn't draw a pair of curtains but she just says that children never worry about their drawings and whether it's wonky which is why they're so joyful oh and here we go yes it doesn't matter if you think your drawing is rubbish it probably isn't it's the doing it that is so important for mental health and well-being AC page OU was making my exact point for me so I'll ask Jennifer to share all the resources in discord for you to access so yeah that's important so this will be available on the youtube channel so you'll be able to leave your comments underneath there and also on discord all of the resources will be shared by Jennifer too perfect thank you everyone thank you for listening thank you so much everybody and you know it's brilliant to see all all the affirmation for how timely and valuable this is Jennifer thank you so much thank you so much