Personal Development
Mindful Learning: The Role of Humanities in Sustainable Well-Being Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Kristina Markman
Mental health challenges among college students have escalated to what some now call a national crisis, with 76% of students reporting moderate or severe psychological distress, according to a 2023 study. As Associate Director of the Humanities Program at Revelle College, UC San Diego, which serves approximately 5,000 students, I have observed this trend firsthand. Since 2015, our college has seen a 537% increase in students of concern—those whose academic progress is impacted by their well-being. While the university has expanded mental health services, these efforts have struggled to meet growing demand. My proposal explores how the humanities can support students' mental health by fostering psychological well-being, self-compassion, and emotional resilience—both through course content and classroom experiences. As many educators at public institutions would attest, the cultural emphasis on prioritizing technical skills, particularly in STEM, has disconnected students from deeper motivations for learning. This utilitarian approach equates success with output rather than personal growth. In contrast, the humanities engage students with questions of meaning, identity, and value, helping them reconnect with a sense of purpose and shared belonging. The humanities lay a foundation for mutual understanding and personal growth, which can support students' well-being in addition to their professional development. Using examples of instructional activities and student responses, I demonstrate how the humanities classroom can proactively address mental health challenges. Additionally, I explore how my approaches align with a broader initiative to integrate credit-based courses on sustainable well-being as a preventative mental health strategy across departments.
Reading “Difficult Dialogues” for Peace: A Hermeneutic Model in the Literary Humanities for Critical Peace Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Nishevita Jayendran
How do the literary humanities mobilise transformative change for sustainable peacebuilding? This paper provides a multidisciplinary theoretical framework in humanities education for a hermeneutic model on reading for peace through the literary humanities. Critical reading that identifies and engages with “difficult dialogues” (Trifonas et al, 2013) in non/fictional representations of “structural” and “cultural” conflicts (Galtung, 1979) can construct normative and ethical commentaries for sustainable peace. ‘Dialogue’ comprises a philosophical constant in peace studies and literary criticism alike, signposting the importance of co-constructed contextual knowledge for understanding different perspectives to/within conflicts. Drawing on the discourse of world literature that distills dialogue as disciplinary praxis in its curriculum and pedagogy, I propose a reading model in Critical Peace Education (CPE) where the “idealistic”, “ideological”, “intellectual” and “politicisational” (Haavelsrud, qtd in Bajaj, 2008) elements of critical peace appear in the reading of world literature through four interlinked interpretative pathways of authorial discourse, literary tradition, cultural contexts and genre. The paper then situates these reflections within current hermeneutic debates on critique and post-critique, liberal humanism, and critical sociology to comment on the relevance of these pathways as critiques of structural and cultural conflict. I conclude with a caselet delineating the development of curriculum and pedagogy using this framework to interpret Chimamanda Adichie’s short story “The Headstrong Historian” (2008) in a reading course in India, and the implications of the critical/normative aspects of interpretation as CPE for sustainable peacebuilding.
Memoir and Narrative Therapy: Writing as Healing
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Lonni Pearce
In an article about the process of writing Solito, the story of his journey as a nine-year old boy from his home in El Salvador to the US, Javier Zamora describes the therapeutic effects of writing: “when we write about our traumas, our brain reworks the neuroplasticity of that event. Meaning that we have the power to shape how we remember trauma.” Research shows that storytelling is a form of psychological and emotional healing, allowing us to sift through our experiences and make meaning from them, even the difficult ones. There’s also evidence that writing offers catharsis, helping writers to process negative emotions and experiences in a way that doesn’t deny the trauma, but explores the meaning or understanding that may come from that trauma. Common to many studies about writing, storytelling, and trauma is the idea that writing provides a form of personal power to shape how we see the trauma and that, in itself, enables some healing. This presentation reviews research in narrative therapy and explores how it informs a series of writing assignments linked to Solito. Bringing together narrative writing, identity exploration, and a conceptual focus on resilience, these assignments invite students to both read and respond to Zamora’s story, but also to write their own stories of resilience.
