Our Strike Against Stress
How do we create a school culture that prioritizes mental health over academic accolades?
“Beloved community stands in unity!” I chanted these words as I pumped my poster in the air at my university’s strike last year. We ultimately won our struggle for improvements in job security, wages for students and temporary faculty working on campus, and affordable housing for students. But we continue to fight for the quality of the intellectual learning environment of our students and community. Universities in America have a long way to go in providing a space in which all learners can succeed.
The “learning environment” is often thought of too narrowly in terms of the classroom—books and software, chairs and technology—as well as the relationship between all these elements. How are the desks arranged? Is learning centralized or decentralized? Do learners have access to all the resources they need?
Though these are important issues, as a researcher who studies how our social environments impact our genetic health, I believe we need a more expansive understanding of the learning environment. The broader stressors in students’ lives are just as important as the physical arrangement of things. A classroom can be well-structured but still fail learners by ignoring the stressors that students face.
Universities are often pressure cookers that rank and compare students on academics, making students feel like they are only as good as their performance, and making them feel like they must hide the uncertainties they face. This is a big problem for students who face financial difficulties, as universities are often partly responsible for creating the structural inequities that harm them—all the uncertain housing, income, and a lack of resources that my striking colleagues and I made inroads on and yet failed to fully remedy.
Students often volley between campus and home stresses all year long, enduring cascading cycles of pressure. At the start of the semester, I get emails requesting that I hold a spot for students who don’t have enough money to register for courses during the registration period. Once registered, many students (even those who have financial aid) worry that they will not have enough to pay for course materials, and some must choose food over books. Many of my students are paying their way through college and face conflicting work and school schedules. Some students also face trouble when they go home to under-resourced living environments or when they find that they cannot afford to get home at all. For many students, exam time is particularly stressful as they navigate working, studying, and preparing for the break ahead.
You might have heard that stress isn’t all bad, and that there are healthy stressors like the stress we face before an exam. This is true. Research has shown that minor temporary “acute” stress like butterflies in the stomach can boost focus and performance. But research has also shown that chronic stress from continually worrying about instability can cause cortisol levels to skyrocket, driving down focus and memory retention in the short term, and academic performance in the long term. Chronic stress can also hurt us in a deeper sense by modifying our DNA and making it impossible for our genes to do the basic work they need to do to keep us thinking clearly and effectively as we learn.
Luckily, we have a large body of research into stress reduction at our fingertips, and much of it dovetails with what we’ve learned from the classroom and from gene-environment science. This research proves that we must ensure every student a safe and healthy living environment on campus where every student can freely access nutritious food, places to exercise and engage in wellness, and mental and physiological health services.
We also need to give our students adequate study support while making space for them to express and become their whole selves. We must create a school culture that prioritizes mental health over academic accolades.
We must communicate to students that their growth is woven with their community’s growth, that they matter to us for more than mere academics. As we see when we unite to support each other, we are not alone. We are in this learning together. We share our learning environment, a space that becomes beloved when we infuse it with awareness of our connectivity, and when we treat each learner as valuable in their own right.