Metadata for Imagining Wellness: Helping Students to Connect, Create and Collaborate in Their Own Wellbeing, 2021

Imagining Wellness supports students to access different literary, historical and visual texts that dealt with mental health in a variety of different ways in order to discover if this helped students to better understand and discuss their own wellbeing and those of their peers.

The project functioned as a 12 week participatory course, in which participants had input in informing the design of the sessions, and created their own multi-media outputs. We surveyed the students at the beginning and end of the project, with a mixed quantitative and qualitative survey running in the middle of the course.

The course ran in three separate sections, with a break for the Easter vacation. These focused on how mental health issues are represented in different forms of narrative texts: literary and historical sources, archival records, and filmic responses to questions raised by mental health issues. At the end of the projects, the students were introduced to editing techniques in the East Anglian Film Archive and had an opportunity to make their own films, reflecting on their experiences while using archival footage.