Positive Pedagogies: Co-creation partnerships to support social and emotional learning in higher education

Student mental wellbeing is an area of concern within higher education, and there is increasing recognition that social and emotional learning has a role to play in supporting student mental wellbeing. This is particularly the case for mature and part time students, who, as outsiders in many traditional university settings, can experience feelings of isolation and a negative impact on wellbeing. This paper presents a study in UK higher education which applied humanisation and social and emotional learning as a theoretical framework to accompany a co-creation methodology, in order to develop resources to support the wellbeing of mature and part time students. This resulted in co-created resources for students and practitioners aiming to support Positive Pedagogies in higher education. Evaluation of the resources found the project had a two-fold effect on mature and part time student wellbeing and experience; it positively impacted on student co-creators’ SEL and overall experience and on student users as they associated an emotional connection with the resource because it had been developed by fellow students, which provided them with a greater sense of agency due to the voice given to the co-creators. Similarly, practitioners found that the guidance embedded wellbeing into teaching practice and encouraged the development of holistic skills such as emotional intelligence and resilience. This paper therefore concludes that the embedding of the humanising framework into co-creation practices can work to positively enhance the resultant emotional response and therefore positive wellbeing of students in a higher education setting.