Wellbeing. Mental health. Education mental health practitioner (MHET). Education wellbeing practitioner. These are the current job titles and catchwords dominating the growing space on the topic of mental health and wellbeing among students today. But there is a missing entry from the conversation, the damage done by something we don’t hear about enough—that of “learning wounds”.
Learning wounds is a new phrase emerging in the fields of psychotherapy as well as education and careers counselling. Coined by Dr Phil Goss from Warwick University, the phrase refers to the mishaps we experience in learning environments that damage our potential to learn. A cruel teacher, a bully in class, public humiliation, or oppressive, demanding parents. Any of these can undermine the learning potential of students.
“Learning wounds can occur in many ways,” says Dr Phil Goss, Associate Professor of Counselling and Psychotherapy at Warwick University, “They needn’t come about only because of how we were bullied or mistreated in school, but can relate as much to how our identities form in comparison to others during the learning years.”
Some examples from contemporary education are obvious. If a student is relatively stronger in science than the arts in class, they would naturally be branded the ‘science person’ and underinvest in other areas. If a student struggles to read or engage with numbers, they might be ushered onto a sports pitch or put down for being ‘not that bright’. This kind of intellectual branding is deep set, longstanding, and even in some cases, a permanent fixture in the belief system of the student.
Socioeconomic issues are also relevant. The worsening economic conditions following Covid 19 and the cost of living crisis have meant that mental health and learning issues are on the rise in schools. Child poverty is so extreme that teachers feel obliged to find food or supplies for their students who struggle to concentrate in class. Covid 19 triggered a wave of social and scholastic incapacities, rendering students uncertain of how to manage their stress in exams, or of how to interact socially in schools. Parents are under increased pressure to support their children with homework when they may have neither the resource nor ability to help. All of these things damage learning.
But while these issues might be managed—even if not cured—by therapists or wellbeing practitioners whose backgrounds are in psychotherapy or counselling, an assumption in the debate is that issues of socio-economics or mental health need to be fixed before a student can begin to learn optimally. It is improving the wellbeing of a child that promotes better learning.
The difficulty with this position is that the wound itself might be directly intellectual; the experience of learning is itself the source of pain and panic. If we define learning as the capacity to encounter or engage with new information, process it and then absorb it well enough that we can apply it to new contexts, incapacities in thinking—finishing a thought, or trusting that it is possible to understand a new idea even if it is complex—can prohibit learning altogether. “More pertinent and specific to learning wounds is the degree to which they affect a person’s capacity to think, understand, and apply new information,” says Dr Goss. “If learning itself is anxiety-making for students, then the source of the anxiety is not other factors but the learning itself.”
Current debates on how to solve mental health or wellbeing issues in schools identify wellbeing and learning as two separate fields but which implicitly have a knock-on effect on each other. The Department of Education claims that “good mental health and wellbeing helps children and young people to develop, attend school, engage in learning and fulfil their potential.” In other words, we must attend to the overall mental health of the young person by using therapeutic methods—CBT, wellbeing therapy, counselling—and hope that personal esteem or emotional stability improves enough that student academic engagement and performance also improves. But how wellbeing relates specifically to learning engagement is not well understood. What is the relationship between self-esteem and learning? How does one support the other? Though the inclusion of these measures is of enormous importance to improving learning atmospheres in schools, they may miss the right target—they learning itself is emotionally charged for students.
The way in which anxiety, panic or poor self-esteem affects learning is complex. In some cases, anxieties or false beliefs interfere with a student’s intellectual confidence, and this might stop them from engaging with new information or believe that it is worth trying. Educational specialist John Holt describes children who will write anything down when asked because they carry they belief that they will likely be wrong anyway. Similarly, prior experiences of poor grades might make students feel unmotivated to engage in something challenging if they believe the reward is limited. Andrew Otty, former FE College leader and policy lead at the Department of Education, says,” For teaching to really cut through to all students, you need to put engagement and confidence first. And I don't mean dumbing down or making it easier. I mean that the fundamental skill of teaching is taking the hard stuff and making it as stimulating and unthreatening as possible.”
In high pressure learning environments, such as those in competitive schools, students may even be too afraid to be wrong and experience learning as a panic-stricken process. “I spend the vast majority of my lesson time building a rapport of trust and safety for my students because too often I’m dealing with fragile intellectual landscapes. They simply don’t believe they can get it,” says Naomi Sutherland, educator and careers specialist for teenagers and young adults. “I remember one girl who jumped from grade 4 to 7 at GCSE religious studies in two months simply because I finally managed to convince her that she wasn’t stupid. And she was at a top private school.”
The implications for poor learning patterns and habits that form in school can be lifelong. Students who believe they are incapable of learning are very unlikely to have high self-esteem or a healthy sense of identity. They also tend to carry these beliefs with them when they consider future career options and underestimate their suitability to a number of careers on the grounds of false beliefs. “Worst of all, students who were repeatedly unsuccessful in school leave with very uncertain, even warped, ideas of their learning abilities,” says Naomi. “They disregard all sorts of innate abilities and career options because of how they were branded at school.” This topic is being explored further in a talk at Warwick University on November 28th 2024, 6.30pm.
There is an emotionality to learning that we need to consider when we are educating students. They want to do well and they are upset and scared of doing badly. There is little value in having a wellbeing arrangement in a school that at the same time advertises the school’s academic standing in national league tables on a bulletin board. Grading is itself experienced emotionally by the young, and in order to heal the learning experience, the wellbeing debate needs to remember that learning itself can be the major wound.
References
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support-in-schools-and-colleges