Providing Holistic Support

It is not unusual for college students to find themselves struggling to balance coursework with part-time jobs, family, friends and other demands. Combine that with an unexpected campus closure and suddenly, the potential for increased stress levels becomes all too real.

Students do not have to be directly impacted by a crisis for it to have a significant impact on their health and well-being. Stress, anxiety and depression during times of widespread upheaval and uncertainty can limit students’ cognitive capacity. While faculty are not counselors, we can offer resources and support, including additional flexibility to meet deadlines, workloads adjustments, and time to adapt to a changing situation.

  • When and how might you discuss the cause of the disruption in class? Teaching in Times of Crisis from the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching offers valuable tips for discussing local, national and international crises in class. Misinformation spreads easily in times of crisis, and students may have misconceptions about the causes of an issue or about communities that are impacted. When possible, correct misinformation that students may be sharing, or engage students in a productive information literacy activity to evaluate the quality of various sources of information.
  • Consider: How might different individuals experience this event differently, depending on their various identity characteristics (race, ethnicity, age, religious affiliation, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)? Crises often impact low-income and communities of color more than affluent, white communities, leading students from different identity groups to respond differently in those situations. Bias incidents, discrimination, and hate crimes may also increase during times of society-wide crisis. These traumas add to the impact of the initial crisis, creating even more challenging conditions for learning, and raising the stakes for instructors to create supportive, inclusive classes.
  • When and how might you share support resources with students as a class? An unexpected period of disruption may cause some students to feel unmotivated or disconnected. They also may find it difficult to ask for help. It can be helpful to remind students that strategies for time management or coping with uncertainty can help them continue to learn and thrive. In addition, even when learning in online asynchronous environments, students can still access campus resources to support remote learning. For additional tips to help students adjust to remote learning, share the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning’s (CATL) strategies for student success in your course.

Additional Resources

  • Supporting Student Mental Wellness in Our Faculty Roles (Elon’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning)
    • Much like physical wellness, mental wellness can be nurtured and supported through various specialized practices and behaviors, including professional skills attained by faculty in the areas of teaching, academic advising and mentoring. By integrating approaches like the Act-Belong-Commit framework into those areas, faculty help to support student wellness behaviors, learning, engagement and a more supportive classroom climate. Furthermore, knowing that these methods also impact students’ mental wellness allows us to intentionally deploy them to serve that purpose as well.
  • Learning Assistance 
    • Whether in-person or online, Learning Assistance offers tutoring support to help students build self-confidence and become independent learners.
  • Belk Library’s Personal Librarian Program
    • Belk Library’s Personal Librarian (PL) Program pairs Elon students with a dedicated point of contact to help them find information, identify sources, understand citations and build additional skills to successfully navigate their academic path while at Elon.
  • The Writing Center 
    • The Writing Center provides individual consultations to all students, faculty and staff on any academic, professional or co-curricular writing project, traditional or multi-modal. Writing Center consultants also collaborate with students in a variety of writing workshops (Honors theses, undergraduate research, designing research posters, etc.)
  • Counseling Center
    • Counseling Services provides psychological interventions, outreach and consultation services to address the emotional, social and academic needs of Elon University students.
  • Therapy Assistance Online (TAO) Self-Help
    • Inform your students of the Therapy Assistance Online (TAO) Self-Help resource. It offers a completely private online library of behavioral health resources that includes interactive educational modules and practice tools to help members of the Elon community better understand and manage how they feel, think and act. The service is free to all Elon students, faculty and staff.
  • Student Care and Outreach
    • This office at Elon University can help you, as an instructor, figure out what resources are available for a particular student need, or they can check in on a student who is struggling in a variety of ways.