At a glance
This project aims to build a reciprocal partnership between the AI/AN (American Indian/Alaska Native) student community and… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2024-2025
- Small
- Awarded
- $3,959
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
- UW Resilience Lab (UWRL)
This project aims to build a reciprocal partnership between the AI/AN (American Indian/Alaska Native) student community and the Wellness and Resilience teaching team to address mental health challenges disproportionately impacting AI/AN students at UW. Through collaboration, the project will identify culturally-specific sources of resilience and create a prevention-focused wellness curriculum tailored to AI/AN students' unique experiences.
The project involves three phases:
- Understanding Needs: Establish a student committee to map mental health challenges, identify sources of stress, and highlight culturally-specific resilience strategies. This phase includes sharing circles to foster trust, relational accountability, and collective storytelling.
- Reciprocity in Learning: Share and adapt four EDUC 215/216 lessons aligned with student-identified needs. These workshops will integrate skill-building exercises and student feedback.
- Co-Constructing the Curriculum: Collaboratively develop a culturally-centered resilience curriculum based on the lessons and feedback, culminating in a sustainable implementation plan and a grant proposal for future funding.
By centering Indigenous self-determination, cultural protocols, and community collaboration, this initiative seeks to enhance mental health supports for AI/AN students while fostering a model for culturally-responsive wellness programs.
The prevalence of mental health symptoms are rising at concerning rates across college campuses, nearly doubling over the last decade (Duffy et al., 2019). This crisis has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with annual trends indicating steeply deteriorating mental health across all student groups (Lipson et al., 2022; CCMH, 2023). American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) students have been disproportionately impacted by this troubling trend, demonstrating the largest decreases in flourishing and the greatest increases in depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation (Lipson et al., 2022; Thulin et al., 2023).
These mental health problems undermine students’ academic success, persistence, and sense of belonging (Eisenberg et al., 2009; NAMI, 2012). The current models of mental health service delivery are woefully inadequate, impeded by an overreliance on reactive and resource-intensive strategies and entrenched access barriers that further encumber students with the taxing responsibility of seeking their own aid, resulting in insufficient care and escalating severity of need (Mowbray et al., 2006). This treatment gap contributes to worsening inequities for racial/ethnic minority students who are less likely to access services (Lipson et al., 2019); AI/AN students have the lowest rates of service use, which may stem from the colonial structures embedded within these systems (Lipson et al, 2022). Increased self-reported historical trauma and racial discrimination predict more distrust of campus health care systems and less favorable attitudes toward seeking care among AI/AN college students (Stewart et al., 2023). A greater focus on preventive services offers a promising and sustainable strategy for addressing student mental health needs and
universities have an institutional responsibility to address these inequitable barriers (Gallagher, 2012). The Wellness and Resilience course series (EDUC 215/216) was developed in the College Education to move upstream to close this widening gap by proactively training students with skills for emotional health drawn from evidence-based treatment modalities (DBT, CBT, ACT, positive psychology) they would not otherwise have access to outside the clinical setting. Initial data analysis indicates that students experience significant improvements in emotional regulation, psychological flexibility, distress tolerance, life satisfaction, adaptive coping, resilience, and sense of belonging after completing the first course (Chugani et al., 2023; Liao, 2022). Increased sense of belonging from participation has also shown to buffer acculturative stress among some racial/ethnic minority students (Liao, 2022). Although psychological coping resources are important for AI/AN students’ college transition and persistence (Rodriguez & Mallinckrodt, 2018; Thompson et al, 2013), AI/AN students remain underrepresented in EDUC 215 limiting opportunity of expanding of these resources.
While serving as an Intertribal Behavioral Health intern with the Winnebago and Omaha nations, I had the opportunity to share course content with students at Little Priest Tribal College and Nebraska Indian Community College and work with a AI/AN psychologist-in-training and tribal college staff to make surface-level cultural adaptations (Goodkind et al., 2012) to reimagine the content in a meaningful way for their community. Feedback from stakeholders and students was positive and indicated that other AI/AN student communities may find similar value, especially if afforded greater latitude to evaluate and co-construct it to center Indigenous knowledge and culturally specific protective factors shown and known by AI/AN communities to be critical to cultivating well-being and reducing distress (Fetter et al., 2023).
The primary goal of this project is to cultivate a reciprocal partnership between the AI/AN student community and members of the Wellness and Resilience teaching team to engage in meaningful dialogue about college mental health challenges disproportionately impacting AI/AN students and leverage collective campus resources to address common needs across all students while reflecting on ways to better serve the unique experiences of AI/AN students at UW. Towards this end, there are three aims: 1) to establish a committee of AI/AN undergraduates to map the mental health challenges they face Co-Constructing a Culturally-Centered Resilience Curriculum for Indigenous Students and identify sources of stress negatively impacting their wellbeing and belonging on campus as well as culturally-specific sources of resilience they use to cope with these immediate and systemic stressors 2) to reciprocally share carefully selected EDUC 215/216 lessons offering relevant content, skills/strategies, and practices that appropriately match the self-determined concerns of the AI/AN student committee 3) to co-construct a culturally-centered prevention-focused resilience and wellness curriculum that integrates student-identified culturally-specific sources of resilience and the resources of the existing course curricula to address student-identified stressors and mental health challenges in a manner and mode determined by the AI/AN student committee and stakeholders. To achieve these aims, this project will be implemented in three phases. The first phase will be dedicated to understanding the mental health landscape of AI/AN undergraduates from their own perspective by centering Indigenous self-determination and seeking to hear the stories of their experiences in fullness (Kovach, 2009). AI/AN undergraduates will be recruited in collaboration with community stakeholders (First Nations, AISC, Intellectual House, and CAIIS faculty) to establish a student committee. To foster trust and relational accountability, the project organizer will follow a protocol of “relational placing” (Fast & Kovach, 2013) by meeting with each student and a related stakeholder for an initial mutual interview focused on sharing connections to AI/AN communities, introducing themselves and the project, and making space for student input. During this phase, students will participate in the first of two sharing circles to identify and prioritize AI/AN student mental health strengths and needs. Sharing circles are designed to facilitate the sharing of stories while upholding cultural protocols (Tachine e al., 2016). Sharing in this context is an act of interdependence that serves to carry out a collective responsibility to produce collective stories of accumulated experiences of stressors and resilience towards improving wellness supports. In order to honor cultural protocols, center kinship relationships, and ensure cultural appropriateness, an AI/AN graduate student will be recruited to facilitate the sharing circles.
During the second phase, the teaching team will practice reciprocity of contributions and responsibility to the partnership (Wilson, 2008) by selecting (in collaboration with the AI/AN student committee) 4 lessons from the existing curriculum aligned to target the mental health challenges identified through the sharing circles. These skill-training lessons will be taught to the student committee in 2-hour workshops that incorporate supervised skill practice, a component of preventive skills-training programs for college students that yields improvements in distress, self-perception, and academic adjustment seven times greater than informational workshops (Conley et al., 2013). At the end of each workshop, the AI/AN students will be invited to complete a reflection to apply learned skills to their own personal experience and a feedback form to identify strengths, weaknesses, and acceptability of the content and skills.
During the third phase, the AI/AN student committee and the teaching team will meet for four 3-hour work sessions to review themes and resources from the initial sharing circle and lesson feedback forms and utilize this learning to co-construct a resilience and wellness curriculum tailored by and for AI/AN college students. The final curriculum and sustainable implementation plan will be determined by the student committee who will be supported in developing their own logic model to illustrate their culturally-centered prevention program design as well as drafting a CSF large grant proposal for funding future implementation. While this proposal frames the final product as a “curriculum,” the intention is for students to design the output that addresses the challenges and relevant context they identified by integrating the requisite communal campus and cultural resources available.
Meaghan Ferrick
Project lead
- mef07@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 2 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- School Psychology Program, College of Education
Request amount and budget
n/a
Measure the impacts
Goal-based evaluation of this project will be measured by the achievement of the primary objective to develop a curriculum for the AI/AN student community and the completion of a CSF large grant Letter of Intent for future implementation (based on student interest). This project will be further evaluated on three levels: participating student wellbeing outcomes (individual), the strengths and challenges of the iterative process of curriculum development (group learning), and the acceptability and feasibility of the curriculum proposed by the group to the AI/AN community (product). On the individual level, AI/AN student resilience and wellbeing gains from reciprocal sharing of resilience and wellbeing resources will be measured through completion of a pre- and post- surveys incorporating validated scales to capture changes in depression and anxiety symptoms, perceived stress, sense of belonging, life satisfaction, resilience, acculturative stress, and historical trauma-related thoughts and emotional distress. During Phase 2, project participants will be invited to keep a daily record of the frequency and utility of resilience skills they practice on a check-list inventory to measure students’ perceived acceptability, feasibility, and appropriateness of skills. Process-based evaluation will be conducted through the facilitation of a concluding sharing circle among participating AI/AN students to collect and synthesize storied experiences of strengths and challenges of the collaboration process, key learnings and take-aways, and reflections on areas for growth and improvement. Additionally, project participants will complete a brief feedback form following each committee meeting for on-going evaluation of students’ sense of agency and belonging in the project and perceptions of the shared content and collaboration process to inform and adjust the process as needed. To evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of the co-constructed curriculum for the AI/AN community, the AI/AN student committee will share their final product with and seek feedback from community stakeholders including First Nations, AISC, Yehawli, Intellectual House staff, and student and faculty members of the broader CAIIS community in a manner determined by the student committee. Potential evaluation methods could include feedback surveys, interviews, focus groups, or an open sharing circle.