According to the ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing (2023), 39% of young people have experienced mental illness in the past 12 months, including almost half of young women and a third of males. Reflecting on the impacts of a global pandemic, climate change, economic uncertainty and technology developments, it’s not hard to see how these might impact wellbeing and resilience in young people.
During the first Transdisciplinary Research Conversation (TD Convo) of 2024 we explored the intersection of mental health, resilience and education for young people with researcher and TD School Lecturer Monique Potts, with further contributions from Catherine Juhasz (Head Teacher Wellbeing, North Sydney Girls High School) and Vanessa Alexander (Change and Innovation Capability Manager, Division of Innovation and Research, NSW Health). This post shares some of the learnings from Monique’s PhD study exploring resilience and experiential learning for young people in the context of uncertain futures and climate disruption.
‘Canaries in the coal mine of society’
With more than 75% of mental health issues developing before the age of 25 we have a critical window to intervene before mental illness takes hold with lifelong consequences. We have the power to alter the trajectory of these statistics… Prevention is always better than cure and the time to act is now.
(Helen Christensen AO, Executive Director Black Dog Institute)
Uhlhaas et al (2021) describe young people as “canaries in the coal mine of society” as they struggle to adjust to social, economic, cultural and technological changes. During the course of my PhD research, I explored the context of these social-cultural changes by talking to educators, youth workers and young people. Building on these interviews, I worked with students and teachers in a Sydney high school to co-design a pilot program of learning modules focusing on developing resilience through meta-competencies of agency, adaptability, creativity, compassion, interbeing and self-awareness.
During the interviews with educators and youth workers, they noted common themes in their work with young people, including a need for freedom (but lack of boundaries), a loss of connection and belonging, and confusion and pressure around identity. Among changing institutions and pathways, they saw challenges around mental health and high levels of uncertainty – all of which were impacting students’ ability to learn.
Only small percentage of young people access help in this context, where there are also increasing challenges with access and affordability. Schools are critical points for early intervention, which leads to better long-term outcomes. As Uhlhaas et al. suggest, new and novel approaches are required to “redesign (the) current service systems to enable early intervention and address the specific needs of young people and families”.
Learning for uncertainty and developing resilience
Amid supercomplexity, the educational task is primarily an ontological task… It is the task of enabling individuals to prosper amid supercomplexity, amid a situation in which there are no stable descriptions of the world.
(Barnett, 2012)
What learning environments and experiences in secondary school can support young people to develop ‘meta-competencies’ for resilient futures? This was a key question in the research, with various practices and methods used to engage with schools, teachers, and young people, including place-based learning, systems thinking, awareness-based systems change, futures thinking and experience design. We also asked what we might learn from other worldviews and knowledges in exploring these concepts, including Buddhism.
Resilience can be defined as “The outcome from negotiations between individuals and their environments for the resources to define themselves as healthy amidst conditions collectively viewed as adverse.” (Ungar, 2004). Building on this definition, I coin the phrase ‘transilience’ or transformative resilience: a conscious, active, dynamic process of adaptation between a person and their environment that enables transformation in response to adverse experiences or circumstances by strengthening relationships to self, community and nature.
6 overarching competences (meta-competencies) were identified in the research as being relevant to learning, adapting and creating change – essentially, developing resilience:
- Adaptability – being able to adapt to changing circumstances and contexts with flexibility and fluidity
- Agency – having confidence that you can influence change personally and collectively in your environment
- Creativity – expressing oneself through creative and artistic avenues to develop something new and of value
- Compassion – being able to see and understand another’s suffering and being prepared to take action to help alleviate it
- Interbeing – being aware of interdependence, interconnectedness of all life; experiencing a connection with inner self, others and the natural world
- Self-awareness – being able to reflect on our thoughts and feelings and understand how they affect our behaviour and experiences
These meta-competencies were integrated into a pilot program with Year 10 students at a Sydney high school, briefly outlined below.
Resilience 2030 pilot program
I learnt that if you listen closely, you can discover small connections in everything – in places, in people. I would describe connection as a warm feeling, as I felt like I belonged when I found these places and/or people.
Student participant, Place-based learning module
Working with a team of experienced educators and practitioners, we designed 6 experiential learning modules that aligned with the meta-competencies:
- Project-based learning (agency, compassion)
- Place-based learning (interbeing, self-awareness)
- Self-awareness and personal resilience (agency, compassion)
- Storytelling and perspective (creativity, compassion)
- Systems Thinking (agency, interbeing)
- Futures thinking (adaptability, creativity)
This approach not only focusses on developing personal resilience through social and emotional learning, but also collective resilience through learning to design interventions for complex real-world problems. In the self-organising project-based learning module, for example, students design a learning experience for younger students to improve their wellbeing, using methods they have learned in the program and their own lived experience. Student-led projects included topics such as challenging toxic sleep culture, reducing stress and increasing a sense of connection and belonging.
The program was evaluated in multiple ways, including observations of researchers and facilitators, feedback from students in post-event surveys, dialogue and discussion during and after activities, student journals and artefacts created during the modules, e.g. art and craft works. The research findings indicate real benefits to wellbeing and resilience through participation in programs such as this, and we hope to partner with the Department of Education to make this evidence-based framework and program available to other schools across NSW. My heartfelt wish is that this research might help to reduce the trauma to young people and their families, and that our young people might not only survive but also thrive in our rapidly changing world.
Watch an overview of Monique’s PhD topic in her 3-minute thesis presentation below:
Further reading and references
Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (sup1), S95–S98.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2023). National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing. Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience Knowledge Hub. (n.d.). Bushfired—Black Summer (New South Wales July 2018—March 2020).
Barnett, R. (2012). Learning for an unknown future. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(1), 65–77.
Lewin, K. (1942). Field theory and learning. In The forty-first yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education: Part II, The psychology of learning. (pp. 215–242). University of Chicago Press.
McKercher, K. A. (2020). Beyond sticky notes. Thorpe-Bowker Identifier Services Australia.
Mission Australia. (2023). Youth Survey 2022.
Scharmer, O., Pomeroy, E., & Kaufer, K. (2021). Awareness-based action research: Making systems sense and see themselves. D. Burns, J. Howard, J. and SM Ospina (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Enquiry. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Uhlhaas, P. J., McGorry, P. D., & Wood, S. J. (2021). Toward a paradigm for youth mental health. JAMA Psychiatry, 78(5), 473–474.
Ungar, M. (2004). A constructionist discourse on resilience: Multiple contexts, multiple realities among at-risk children and youth. Youth & Society, 35(3), 341–365.