4.2 Presentation Outline
In this outline, Open Education Instructional Designer Veronica Vold summarizes key themes and claims from the keynote presentation. It is intended to orient future participants to the presentation video recording on the next page and to capture the speaker’s major questions for the open education community in Oregon.
Outline for “Harnessing the Resilience Within” by Mays Imad
Mays begins by noting that instructors can make assumptions about how people in a room are feeling, but if people are stressed, overwhelmed, or energy-depleted, they tend to turn to deficit thinking and disengagement. Opening with the question, “how are people feeling?” gives the community an opportunity to see the range of emotional responses in the room. In particular, people who are feeling tired or unmotivated see how many others share their experience, which can help everyone to feel less isolated and bring relief.
The presentation takes shape in four parts:
Introduction
Part 1: The arts as response to trauma
Part 2: Applying polyvagal-informed self-care and wellness in teaching and learning
Part 3: Open discussion
Introduction
In her ongoing research on the neuroscience of learning, Mays asks students to explain: “what does it mean to have a fulfilling experience in higher education?”
- A top theme in data is that students feel they they must leave part of themselves behind when they enter the classroom or Zoom room
- Mays shares one student’s comment in 2020: “[Higher education] expects students and professors to drop everything when in the classroom but their personal lives are a part of them because daily lives are [filled with] emotional events that represent them.”
- Students experience a fragmentation of the self
- Mays shares one student’s comment in 2020: “[Higher education] expects students and professors to drop everything when in the classroom but their personal lives are a part of them because daily lives are [filled with] emotional events that represent them.”
- Higher education studies also show morale issues and demoralization among faculty, staff, leaders, and administrators
- Surveys show themes of exhaustion, overwhelm, and frustration
- It takes more than a care package or free T-shirt to understand and appreciate the depth of the current struggle
- How can we metabolize pain, grief, loss, and trauma to harness resilience within?
- We can’t talk about resilience without also talking about how we are
- This presentation draws on science, student voices, and colleague voices to help us remember that we can heal
- “Our humanity depends on each other,” to paraphrase Desmond Tutu: Neuroscience tells us that the brain is the only organ in the body that is a social organ: how I show up, how you show up, we impact each other
- The brain is a social, relational organ, which allows for a phenomenon of Secondary Traumatic Stress (STS):
- Multiple risk factors contribute: repeated exposure, personal trauma, chronic stress, excessive wor