Celebrating the Whole Self: Showing Up For Students’ Mental Health

April
2024
Mitra Sapienza
ASCCC North Representative
José Luis Tekun Mejia
Community Organizer

Part I: Mental Health and Trauma-Informed Teaching and Learning

By Mitra Sapienza, ASCCC North Representative

Many community colleges across the state are prioritizing building cultures of care on their campuses. In order for us all to continuously evolve with cultural humility in the classroom and beyond, the mental health of students and educators is paramount. In Fall 2021, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) passed Resolution 03.03 F 21 requesting that the organization “[identify] effective practices for mental health awareness and trauma-informed teaching and learning” and “advocate for mental health resources and services.”[1]  Lisa Cox Romain and Kandace Knudson (2023) highlight the importance of self-care resources in “Self-Care in the Age of Collective Trauma,” and faculty continue to advocate for furthering mental health resources, with the ASCCC passing Resolution 05.01 S22 to request funding for mental health resources, services, and professional learning. Thus faculty are encouraged to maintain a level of urgency around supporting the mental health of students, colleagues, and themselves. As faculty open doors to understanding mental health, they can better consider how classrooms can be spaces of healing and growth.

Part II: No Wrong Door

José Luis Tekun Mejia, community organizer

Trauma is a part of life and can impact any of us personally, interpersonally, and societally, from the loss of a loved one through natural causes or community violence, from economic war and genocide, from the long-term impacts of systemic racism and oppression through generations of political decisions that value economic goods over human life, and from colonization and slavery at the very foundation of the United States through the cradle-to-prison and deportation pipeline.

Trauma is hard to avoid or steer clear of, and community college students and all the people who make the system run are not immune. Luckily, there is a wealth of knowledge, both academic and ancestral, that shows that healing and recovery is possible, and those who are dedicated to education play a pivotal role in helping themselves and their students actualize as a people and as a human race.

Students and faculty are all touched by trauma in one way or another, and certain basic responses affect the brain, body, and spirit. Just as faculty show up to work after a difficult breakup or still grieving the loss of a loved one, so do students. With even a basic expansion of trauma and resilience literacy–applying a growth mindset to the possibility of information and practices that challenge some basic falsehoods that we’ve learned from our upbringing, education, societal norms, media, or are even built into the fabric of the institutions that we work for–we can work to serve the whole student, and ourselves in the same process.

Research as old as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has clearly shown that to self-actualize, other basic needs must be met first. If people are struggling with unstable housing, it can impact their performance on their jobs or as students. Basic things can be done to acknowledge these facts and ensure that classroom doors can also connect students to resources to eliminate basic barriers that might be standing in the way of academic success. If colleges begin to work as a community and are proactive about addressing trauma in educational practices, they will also contribute to meeting their goals of academic rigor and closing historic equity gaps.

When I was a student at City College of San Francisco, I was still transitioning from leaving the street economy, being a parentified child, and becoming a parent myself. Little did I know, I was also dealing with mental health repercussions of the trauma I faced as a child, youth, and young adult. I was dealing with what I now know were symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and had recurring bouts with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, hypervigilance, nightmares, and flashbacks. These symptoms affected me in every area of my life, including how I showed up, to class as a student.

I will never forget my senior year in high school, when I took a course called Peer Resources because I thought it was going to be an easy class. I remember meeting my teacher, Sarah. A short white lady that, on the surface, I could tell didn’t grow up in my hood. I assumed she could not relate to me at all and definitely would not care about me. But every day she stood outside the entrance of her class, warmly welcoming and greeting all her students, with no pretense. I soon began to notice she genuinely cared and really meant it when she asked, “how are you doing today?” It was such a simple question, but for me, it was loaded. I was experiencing abuse, neglect, focused on dropping off my sisters at their schools before I went to mine. Sarah actually remembered this and would ask, “how's your sister?” Little by little my walls started to come down, and I became invested in the class.

Later, when I was working in youth development and violence prevention and intervention, my trainer and mentor Ray told me, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care,” and this is what I now know my teacher practiced with me. While I was working in policy advocacy and research to create quality standards for disconnected transitional-age youth programming, creating a safe climate of care and love was pivotal. I worked with Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth to pass the Safe and Supportive Schools resolution, which ended willful defiance suspensions and put in their place restorative practices and positive behavioral interventions. All this was based on trauma research to create a caring and loving climate and culture.

Trauma, by definition, happens to us, and we do not have control at the moment. We can detach ourselves from our emotions, and even from our own bodies. Some practices that can seem simple, when done with commitment and authenticity, can give power back to students and create healthy attachments amongst themselves and our whole school communities. Co-creating community agreements instead of imposing rules, using a talking piece, having opening and closing rituals, and simply not pretending like our classroom is somehow immune or separate from everything we are facing in our lives and world is imperative to creating classrooms where students can show up being themselves and open up even wider to all that our community college classrooms offer.

As a community educator serving in neighborhoods with people facing some of the issues that I’ve survived, I often have the urge to want to save everyone and have definitely learned the hard way that I can’t. However, we can be connectors and resource brokers and function as a village to help meet our community’s holistic needs together.

Part III: A Resource List

Below is a list of resources for faculty to access in both their personal and professional mental health and trauma-informed teaching and learning journeys. Some of these resources may already be in one’s toolkit or part of one’s practice; for others, they may be new and exciting. A systemic paradigm shift is needed, with all faculty working together to address, acknowledge and continue advocating for students’ mental health. The ASCCC hopes that this list of resources will encourage ongoing learning, exploration and advocacy about the importance of mental health and trauma-informed teaching practices in all California community colleges.

Please also join our upcoming ASCCC May Mental Health webinars.

Resources in the News

Resources from California Community College State Chancellor’s Office and Vision Resource Center

California Community Colleges Health & Wellness website, which is  “designed to help CCC leadership, faculty, staff, and students share best practices, collaborate, and develop innovative services and policies.”

Presentations (require log in to a college’s resource portal)

Online Classes and Interactive Trainings (require log in to a college’s resource portal)

  • Building a Lasting Culture of Safety: 37-minute online class “designed to help you explain the importance of safety not only for your specific employees, but to the people they work with and the families and friends they go home to every night.”
  • Trauma-Informed Care: One hour online course, comprehensive list of resources, “Beginning with causes and effects of trauma, this module introduces the importance and practice of trauma-informed care, including recognizing, understanding and appropriately responding to student trauma.”
  • Workplace Mental Health part 1: 42-minute course divided into 6 lessons, the course “highlights the pervasiveness of mental illness and conveys mental illness warning signs, risk factors, and coping skills”… and “explains how to create a healthy workplace and appropriately intervene in the case of a crisis situation at work.”
  • Workplace Mental Health part 2: Overview of Mental health Challenges, 8-minute video course with handouts, “created to shed light on how to manage mental health in the workplace as an employee.”
  • Microlearning: Mental Health Awareness, a playlist of 3 interactive modules:
    1. Melt Away Stress with a 3-minute Breathing Exercise, a five-minute interactive course encouraging deep breathing to relieve stress.
    2. Escape Anxiety with a 5-minutes Grounding Practice, a five-minute interactive course encouraging anxiety relief through focus on the five senses.
    3. 3 Desk Stretches to Instantly Improve Your Day, a five-minute interactive course encouraging movement while seated at your desk.

Resources from the ASCCC

References

Cox Romain, L., & Knudson, K. (2023, April). Self-Care in the Age of Collective Trauma. Senate Rostrum.

1. Full text of all ASCCC resolutions