Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid

This year Mental Health Awareness Week falls on the 15th to 21st May and focuses on anxiety, a normal emotion that we are all familiar with and one that has significance for our teaching and learning in all sorts of ways. Anxiety can easily build up to the point that it becomes debilitating and, given how common and ubiquitous it is as a mental health problem, we can guarantee that it will be present and making itself felt in our classrooms. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that anxiety has come to characterise so much of the educational project we are all engaged in, that it has become baked in.

But… what if we could all leave our worries and anxieties at the door every time we walk into a classroom? What if, to draw on the Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, there is a “School of Unlearning” where what we bake is not suffused with adrenaline and other anxiety spices? As the Mole and the Boy find themselves wondering aloud:

“Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid”.

What sort of learning community might such emotional literacy give rise to?

In this blog, I want to re-imagine education and, in doing so, strike a hopeful note for Mental Health Awareness Week, one that highlights ways we can easily integrate emotional literacy for wellbeing into the curriculum.