Appropriately addressing mental health in relation to socio-cultural context and age group, remains a global challenge (World Health Organisation, 2017). Approximately 420,000 children in England who live with a parent who suffers from problematic drug use (Centre for Social Justice, 2013).

As this poses a risk to children’s health and wellbeing and has already been evidenced to negatively impact classroom performance, there is a need, perhaps now more than ever, for teachers and families to work collaboratively towards a ‘whole-person’ schooling approach.

This presentation will involve an introduction to the proposed study, which seeks to explore whether the inclusion of embodied knowledge can prove useful when teaching children vulnerable subjects, such as mental health and illness. The aim is to introduce an educational style which has potential to provide unique insights about learning from the children’s perspective, and to thereby reduce the power imbalances between the ‘teacher’ and the ‘taught’.

This project is part of a collaboration between the Southwest Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) and Southmead Project, Bristol.

Speaker profiles

Victoria Christodoulides is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate in the University of Bath’s Department for Health. Her research focuses on understanding the value of creative experiences for recovery from trauma in the context of socioeconomic inequality.

Maike Klein is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate in the University of Bath’s Department of Social & Policy Sciences. Her research focuses on the lived experiences of drug service users who have relapsed repeatedly from their recovery back into opiate and/or crack cocaine misuse.