Following several major grants awarded to the College of Design by the NC State University Foundation, the First Year Experience has blossomed into a program that integrates wellness and mental health awareness into an interdisciplinary design curriculum. The First Year Experience is led by program director Sara Queen, an associate professor of architecture in the college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe First Year Experience is not just about learning content, but also learning radically new ways to think and work,\u201d Queen said. The College of Design is a very close-knit community, and most of the first year involves practicing intellectual risk-taking through studio-based learning. The wellness-informed curriculum was created because the freshman experience in design bridges the vast threshold or transition between high school and college where students are expected to routinely fail and subsequently grow through trial and error.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After COVID-19, Queen and others noticed a disparity in students entering the program compared to their pre-pandemic counterparts. She observed that students coming into college were already at their capacity of risk-taking and stress, and lacked the social skills necessary to engage in collaboration. She likens this phenomenon to Maslow\u2019s Hierarchy, arguing that it is impossible to get into a creative flow, take risks, or successfully recover from failure if one\u2019s most basic needs are not being met. If a student is already feeling overwhelmed, they cannot productively engage with the transformative curriculum and develop new modes of thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, Queen decided to shift the program, bringing in Allison Grubbs, an alumnus and practicing clinical social worker, to integrate mental health and emotional literacy \u2013 which she describes as \u201cunderstanding and feeling emotions from the bottom-up\u201d \u2013 to deepen students’ connections with each other, and with themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
By combining instruction on polyvagal theory \u2013 how your nervous system affects emotion, social connection and fear \u2013 with a focus on identifying how previous experiences can help students approach current problems, Grubbs hopes to give the students a more holistic perspective of themselves and their bodies and learn more compassionate, human-centered design approaches. \u201cA lot of these skills that we\u2019re talking about help someone be a better person and a better designer. It\u2019s going to be helpful all the way around\u2013 professionally and personally,\u201d Grubbs said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grubbs, who taught a module in D100: Design Inquiry, gave students the opportunity to engage in honest self-evaluation, allowing them to see that their work is valuable even if imperfect, and to get excited about what they have achieved and how they will improve. \u201cIt\u2019s important to help students realize that fully retreating when they are at capacity will end up making them feel worse- sometimes it\u2019s better to accomplish something, even if it\u2019s small. The goal is to improve life skills linked to how we feel about ourselves, how we work and how we perceive our work,\u201d Grubbs said.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
\n\n“The goal is to improve life skills linked to how we feel about ourselves, how we work and how we perceive our work\u201d<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The First Year Experience changes included weekly personal reflections and extracurricular nights which included activities like cooking, yoga, games, and screenprinting. Reflections throughout the program were more than a simple well-check: prompts pushed students to uncover their core values and better understand themselves. Grubbs and Emily Burdo, College of Design Embedded Counselor, also supplemented the program with a volunteer psychoeducational group that was more clinical and communal in nature for students who needed additional support. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Queen deliberately focused the curriculum to focus on peer-to-peer collaboration, helping students regain social skills lost during the pandemic. The paper project, a foundational assignment in the First Year Experience, required students to create a wearable or inhabitable structure that examines how we relate to one another. <\/p>\n\n\n