University of Melbourne Events Calendar

The student wellbeing crisis is becoming one of the most urgent challenges facing schools today. Across Australia, rising levels of anxiety, disengagement, school refusal, and mental health concerns are placing enormous pressure on students, families, teachers, and education systems. National reports continue to highlight the critical link between student wellbeing, attendance, learning outcomes and social connection, yet many schools are being asked to respond without adequate clarity, support or resources.

As expectations on schools continue to grow, so too do the tensions surrounding how wellbeing is understood, who is responsible for addressing it, and whether current approaches are meeting the scale of the challenge. What should the role of teachers and schools be in supporting student mental health?

With featured leaders who are shaping national policy, pioneering mental health initiatives in schools, and producing internationally recognised research into child development, equity and educational wellbeing, the panel offers a rare opportunity to hear from experts working at the forefront of systemic change across education and child health.

Drawing on policy, research and practice insights, this timely panel discussion will confront the complexities, pressures and possibilities shaping student mental health and wellbeing in schools, and explore what must change now to better support young people and the educators working alongside them.

Registration is essential.

ACCESSIBILITY
If you have any support requirements in order to participate fully, please let us know via educationevents@unimelb.edu.au to ensure that we can arrange any reasonable adjustments.

‘These were indeed strange times. Yet the forces at work in them were not new. Men like Donald Trump are embedded in US history, mythology and popular culture. Rank populists, hucksters, fakers, grifters, rent-seekers, blowhards, tycoons, kleptocrats, narcissists, psychopaths and delinquents – or, from the other point of view, rugged individualists, entrepreneurs, men of vision, men of destiny, instruments of God. No diorama of mainstream American life in any era could be without them.’
– Don Watson, The Shortest History of the United States of America

Join Don Watson as he traces how the central conflicts of the United States – those over freedom, race, frontiers, enterprise, religion and violence – play out through its history: a country at war with itself in the 1860s, the leader of the free world less than a hundred years later, and a nation beset by wild division and turmoil in the twenty-first century.

Featuring an introduction from Professor Michael Wesley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Global Culture & Engagement), at the University of Melbourne.

This event is presented by University of Melbourne Arts and Culture and Readings