Exploring Well-Being in Graduate Education: A Rackham Symposium View Other Sessions

This session explores the social ecological model (SEM) as a framework for creating inclusive, culturally responsive experiences for underrepresented students in higher education. With a focus on dismantling systemic barriers and promoting holistic well-being, participants will gain practical strategies to enhance inclusion at individual, interpersonal, community, and institutional levels. At the University of Michigan, these strategies have led to a 75 percent increase in engagement, cross-department collaboration, and event attendance among underrepresented student groups in just one academic year.

The session will introduce the radical love framework, inspired by healing-centered engagement (Ginwright, 2016) and critical pedagogy, offering evidence-based strategies for affirming marginalized voices. This framework integrates intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) and cultural humility to build identity, community, and resilience among underrepresented students. Participants will learn to apply SEM to address systemic inequities across multiple levels, from personal biases to institutional policies, with examples from University of Michigan initiatives.

The session will also offer strategies for fostering collaboration across departments, student organizations, and administrative bodies to create equitable environments.

Participants will acquire tools for designing culturally responsive programs, focused on well-being and tailored to underrepresented students, that can also be used in any context. These tools will promote intentionality, belonging, and growth in both professional and personal settings. By the end, participants will have actionable insights on developing inclusive mental health programming, adjusting curricula to reflect diverse perspectives, and fostering cross-departmental collaboration. Through case studies and interactive activities, participants will deepen their understanding of systemic barriers as well as student well-being and leave with a clear action plan to foster greater inclusion for underrepresented students on their campuses.

This session is ideal for educators, administrators, student affairs professionals, and student organization leaders committed to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in higher education. It is designed for those ready to reflect on their practices and foster meaningful change. Join us to design inclusive experiences that promote belonging, well-being, and success for yourself and your students.

Exploring the pilot "ArtsRX" initiative that explores arts participation as a positive factor in mental health and well-being. 

Professor Clague is a full professor of musicology with tenure at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance and serves as Executive Director of the University of Michigan’s Arts Initiative. He also enjoys affiliate appointments at the University of Michigan in American Culture, African and Afro-American Studies, Non-Profit Management, and Entrepreneurship. He is co-advisor to the student organization Music Matters.

To create real systemic change, we need to change the way things are. This only happens when we change the thoughts and assumptions that led to our current state. We can do this by asking different questions. This interactive workshop will use a real world case-study to explore the process of using the catalytic thinking framework to change the questions we typically ask ourselves when designing a graduate student course and the corresponding impacts on graduate student well-being.

So often, our planning processes are guided by questions rooted in reactivity, suspicion, exclusion, and scarcity:

• What’s the problem?
• Where will the money come from?
• Can we trust them?

While these kinds of questions can be important, they reveal just a small part of what’s going on, causing us to become stuck in a loop of mitigating negative outcomes without actually creating positive ones.

Catalytic thinking is a visionary systems-change framework rooted in brain science and focused on cause-and-effect conditions. The framework guides us through a series of questions around people, purpose, and resources:

• What is the future we want to create? For whom?
• What could we accomplish together that we couldn’t do on our own?
• What can we share with others?

Questions like these help us focus on possibility, connection, inclusion, and enoughness in order to create a humane, healthy future that’s different from our past.

This is the framework Madeline DeMarco turned to when she was approached by the Athletic Training program at Adrian College to teach a mental health course to students in their professional master’s degree program, AT505 BH. Much of higher education today is based and structured around habit, ways of doing things that reward competition and independence over community and care, no longer meeting the needs of today’s students. And with mental health and well-being needs rising around college campuses nation-wide, it was important to design and implement a course, especially one focused on mental health, that rethought that status quo in order to meet the program’s accreditation requirements and promote the holistic well-being of AT505 BH’s students and instructors.

The catalytic thinking framework was the perfect tool for this. It enabled DeMarco to change the questions (and assumptions behind them) we typically ask when we start designing a course: “What readings will we assign?” “What’s the grading breakdown?” “When will the exams be?” in favor of starting with our strengths, values, and other conditions needed to create a future graduate student course different from one of the past. As a result, she was able to create a course based on trust, the learning process, and work-life balance that students feel is valuable and worth their time to participate in.

During the workshop, DeMarco will use the catalytic thinking framework to explain the design process and outcomes of AT505 BH. Workshop participants will get the opportunity to follow along with the framework and use it to practice designing a course, program, or initiative of their own that promotes graduate student well-being.

Fostering Sustainable Graduate Student Well-Being: Lessons and Approaches from the Well-Being Advocate Program: 

The prevalence of mental health challenges among graduate students can be influenced by the distinct academic and professional environments in which they study and grow. These environments are further shaped by the unique cultural norms and values of individual graduate programs, creating complex and varied well-being climates. Declines in well-being can impact critical aspects of the student experience, including formation of a disciplinary identity, sense of belonging, and decisions about continuing in academia.  

The University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School’s Well-Being Advocate Program is a cornerstone initiative advancing the principles of the Okanagan Charter within graduate education by creating sustainable well-being environments through systemic change. This innovative program integrates well-being into graduate program systems and policies by partnering with and empowering graduate programs and program leadership to help identify and implement tailored interventions that foster well-being cultures.

Exploring Graduate Student Well-Being: Insights from the Well-Being Advocate Program Survey Data:

Graduate student mental health and well-being have emerged as critical concerns within higher education, with research indicating increased rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout across disciplines. While numerous studies have examined well-being in specific graduate programs, there is a limited methodological use of synthesizing data collected through different survey instruments across varied academic contexts. Additionally, the application of advanced methodologies to analyze data is little to none.

Our project plans to analyze de-identified survey data from five to six graduate programs at the University of Michigan that were collected over the past year by the Well-Being Advocate Program. By utilizing advanced technology, we plan to process qualitative and quantitative responses from non-identical surveys that share the common goal of assessing student well-being. This methodological approach enables us to identify patterns and relationships between student experiences and various dimensions of well-being that transcend individual program boundaries.

Specifically, we utilize large language models (LLMs) to categorize and analyze free-text responses, supplemented by word embedding techniques that reveal semantic relationships within student narratives. This approach allows us to process data at scale while preserving the nuanced perspectives of individual students across diverse graduate environments. Additionally, the utilization of local LLM’s can ensure secure analysis of any potential confidential data.

We expect our analysis to reveal connections between academic structures and student well-being outcomes that may remain invisible when examining programs in isolation or examination of text in a traditional method. We argue that this technology-enhanced methodology not only provides actionable insights for improving graduate education at Michigan but also demonstrates a transferable approach for institutions facing similar challenges in understanding their graduate student populations holistically.

By showcasing how advanced AI technologies can advance well-being research, this work contributes to both the understanding of graduate student experiences and the methodological advancement of well-being assessment in higher education contexts.

Description is forthcoming.