Teaching Matters Edinburgh

Teaching Matters Edinburgh is the audio side of the University of Edinburgh's teaching and learning hub, a project that also includes a website and a blog. The speakers include wellbeing advisors and a club president as well as experts. Each episode opens with a short introduction from the team, which sets up who is taking part before handing over to them. A series on student wellbeing is split into numbered parts, so a single discussion can continue across several episodes. The three 'Wellbeing in the curriculum' episodes bring wellbeing advisors Douglas and Tessa together with Dr. Mark Holterhoff. Part 1 starts with definitions. It goes through the PERMA model's focus on engagement and relationships and refers to Seligman and the World Health Organization on meaning and purpose. One of its most memorable points is simple: people remember their university friends long after they have forgotten individual lectures. Part 2 looks at practice at other universities and argues for building wellbeing into existing courses rather than adding a mental health class or workshop. Georgetown's approach, which reaches students through an introductory biology course in the mainstream curriculum, is mentioned with clear respect. Co-curricular and extracurricular activities are presented as ways to go further once that foundation is in place. Part 3 covers cultural perspectives and the need for approaches tailored to each subject. It also asks a harder question: what about students who want their academic work and their wellbeing kept separate? The answer comes back to how wellbeing is defined, and to how personal a classroom can reasonably ask anyone to be. The two-part 'Student Wellbeing and the Hidden Costs of Financial Hardship' pairs Tessa with Grace Clark, President of the 93% Club. Grace's starting point is stark: two students with the same mental health struggles can have very different experiences depending on whether they have money behind them. She describes the club as a place where members can vent. Someone struggling with a landlord or an electricity provider often finds another member who has dealt with the same problem. She also remembers a school with more than a thousand students, one pastoral support worker and no conversation about mental health at all. Further education gets a similar verdict. Outside the wellbeing series, 'What is interdisciplinarity?' follows Emily, an undergraduate at the EFI, as she collects views from students and from Dr. David Overend and Dr. Jill Robinson. Jill, introduced as someone who started out as a chemistry student, describes a discipline as an area of knowledge with its own rules and its own tests of truth, and mathematics as a discipline that prizes proof. The tone throughout is warm and collegial, more like a talk between colleagues than a lecture. Episodes close by pointing to the blog and signing off with the same two words: stay curious.