March 2024
Maegan Arney, a doctoral student in Education, was awarded a $5,000 grant from Washington University's Mindfulness Science and Practice Cluster for a collaborative project with Dr. Chris Rozek titled "An Emotional Support Intervention to Improve Educator Well-Being, Increase Mindfulness, and Change How Teachers Communicate About Stress to Students.”
"Dr. Rozek and I are very excited to work on this project, and we very much appreciate the funding support that we have received from the Mindfulness Cluster." said Arney.
About the Project
Educators have stressful jobs and experienced widespread burnout and a decline in their overall well-being during the pandemic. They also serve as key emotional supports for students who often come to them with their emotional difficulties and stressful life situations. Many educators have noticed that students are even more likely to experience and need support for their emotions and mental health since the pandemic began. Therefore, additional emotional supports for educators are both well-timed and relevant.
The proposed study will test a newly developed emotional support intervention for teachers. The intervention will provide a toolkit of effective emotion management strategies and different ways people think about their emotions, including how to utilize mindfulness personally and how to be more mindful with their students. Evidence from this study will help us learn about intervention efficacy and gather feedback from teachers about the intervention materials with an aim of improving the content based on that feedback.
About the Grant
The newly created Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures Cluster on Mindfulness Science and Practice at Washington University in St. Louis is offering Small Grants of up to $5,000 to support activities related to the advancement and promotion of the Mindfulness Cluster. Our mission is to achieve a more systemic integration of mindfulness science and practice, to inform our understanding of how mindfulness can be best applied, taught, and implemented. Likewise, by developing a deeper respect for, and appreciation of, the historical, philosophical, and religious contexts in which mindfulness practices are situated, we hope to provide a more effective evaluation of their physiological and psychosocial mechanisms of action.
