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Teaching and learning emotionally challenging content

​The study of sensitive content can have serious impacts on student learning and wellbeing, particularly for students with lived experience and/or mental health conditions. Research with distance students taught us that students arrived with skills, capacities, and strengths to navigate emotionally challenging and demanding situations that they can apply to reduce risk and increase resilience in their study of sensitive topics (Downes et al 2022). We call these emotional resilience skills and understand them as a universally relevant academic skillset for all students and educators.

You can find out more about this approach in this short video (08:19 mins) by emotional resilience team member Ruth Wall. Ruth reflects on her own teaching practice and outlines what educators can do to best support students to engage with content that is emotionally challenging to study.

Introducing our emotional resilience toolkit

We have created an emotional resilience toolkit to help educators to affirm and sustain students emotional resilience skills in teaching and learning. Our toolkit aims to remove barriers to learning emotionally challenging content and promote wellbeing for all. It features  accessible multi-media resources and guides co-produced with students that are available to use and adapt for non-commercial purposes on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. You are invited to use them within your teaching and learning practice.

We also encourage you to get in touch with us. We are happy to share editable word versions of all our guides and downloads of our resources for you to adapt and use in your teaching. We'd also love to hear about how useful our guides and resources are for you and your students, if you have any suggestions for what to include from your own practice, and how we can improve our resources in the future. You can find our contact details at the bottom of this page.

If you have used or piloted any of our resources in your teaching, it would be very helpful if you could complete this short survey (the survey closes on 15 July 2023). 

On this page you will find information and links to our:
  • Educator Guide: educator-facing guidance to support educators to embed and sustain emotional resilience skills in the design and delivery of teaching. This is accompanied by emotional resilience study skills tutorial slides as an example of what a dedicated teaching session on emotional resilience study skills could look like.
  • Student Guide: student-facing guidance to support student learning of emotionally challenging content.
  • Content Note Guidance: educator-facing guidance about an approach to help identify and notify potentially emotionally challenging content.
  • Emotional resilience video series: A total of eight short videos that feature accounts of students, educators, academic researchers and student mental health advisors sharing their insights from teaching, researching and learning about emotionally challenging content as well as supporting student's mental health and wellbeing. This is accompanied by Top Tips: Using the Emotional Resilience Video Series in your Teaching with ideas on how you could use these videos in your teaching.
  • Student-led audio discussion: This four-part audio features students and tutors discussing the key impacts, strategies and benefits of teaching and learning sensitive content, as well as what a duty of care for educators and students could look like. Transcripts are included.

Teaching Emotionally Challenging Topics:
An educator’s guide to supporting emotional resilience skills in higher education

This guide is for educators who have responsibilities for the design and delivery of teaching in higher education settings including: face-to-face, hybrid, and online spaces. It offers reflective questions, resources and best practice examples that can be used and adapted to affirm and strengthen student emotional resilience skills.

This guide has been authored by Leigh Downes, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University, and Ruth Wall, Associate Lecturer at The Open University, in collaboration with the Positive Digital Practices emotional resilience team.

Top Tip: This PDF includes all the PDFs of our guidance as appendices making it perfect for offline use.

The emotional resilience study skills tutorial slides were originally
created by Anne Alvaer, Associate Lecturer at The Open University and adapted by Ruth Wall, Associate Lecturer at The Open University.

Your emotional resilience skills:
​A guide for students studying emotionally challenging content

​This guide is for higher education students who may come across emotionally challenging content as part their studies. It aims to provide students with practical help and suggestions to help them to engage with topics that are emotive or difficult for them.
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​Top Tip: You could make this guide available to students at the start of a course.

​This guide was initially authored by Ruth Wall, Associate Lecturer at The Open University based on her professional teaching expertise. It has now been updated in collaboration with the emotional resilience team led by Dr Leigh Downes, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University.

​Sections highlighted in yellow indicate where you can include information about support services available in your institution. Please get in touch for an editable word version.

Content note guidance


To help you to identify and notify students about emotionally challenging content in your courses this guidance offers an approach that classifies content into three categories with recommendations for how to phrase content notes and integrate them with signposting to further support and guidance.

This guidance has been adapted from 'Distressing Content' published by Securing Greater Accessibility (SeGA) at The Open University and authored by Kate Lister at The Open University.

Emotional resilience video series


This resource consists of eight short videos that have been co-created with students, educators, academic researchers, and student mental health advisors. Each person was asked to share their insights from their experiences of supporting student wellbeing, learning and teaching about, or researching, a topic that they found emotionally challenging in some way. 

​These videos can be downloaded and used in any combination to support university students to achieve any of the following learning outcomes:
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• identify emotional responses to content
• understand the impacts of emotional wellbeing on study
• explore how the personal and emotional can overlap in the study of sensitive topics
• build an individual emotional resilience toolkit
• identify the benefits of engaging with sensitive topics for learning and wellbeing

You can find suggestions on how you might use videos in student learning activities and resources for further learning in our Top Tips resource 

Student experiences of learning emotionally challenging content
Arabella Cox (02:30 mins)

Arabella is a mature part-time criminology distance student who initially struggled with her diagnosis of bipolar depression. In this short video Arabella shares her experience of withdrawing from a course on mental health after she was triggered by some of the content. She talks about how she returned to study criminology, her insights into being triggered, and what she has learned from her study of sensitive content.
Kyle Andrews (05:30 mins)

Kyle studied social science at a distance whilst he was dealing with depression and anxiety. In this short video Kyle describes some of the challenges he faced in his studies including self-motivation, confidence, and work-life balance. He shares his insights on how he overcame these challenges and reflects on his capabilities and achievements.

Academic experiences of emotionally challenging research

Steve Tombs (04:26 mins) This video has a content note for discussion of death, bereavement, disasters and the Grenfell Tower Fire.

Steve is a Professor in Criminology who specialises in research and campaign work around state and corporate killing and avoidable deaths. In this short video, he talks about his emotional responses and how his personal and professional worlds overlapped in his research on the Grenfell Tower Fire.
Sharon Mallon (07:05 mins)

Sharon is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health who specialises in suicide and suicide bereavement research. In this short video, she talks about her experience of doing research about the impacts of suicide on bereaved families. She talks about how she prepared herself for doing interviews with bereaved family members in their homes and what strategies she developed to process and manage the emotional responses she experienced during her fieldwork.
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 Student Mental Health Advisors experiences of supporting students
Neill Boddington (06:38 mins)

Neill is a mental health advisor at a distance learning institution with experience of supporting students and staff. In this short video he talks about how to spot some of the key signs of emotional distress, the benefits of creating a coping strategy, how to talk to someone about support needs, and offers some practical strategies to help navigate emotional responses.
Ashley Cave (04:20 mins) This video has a content note for mention of suicide and child sexual abuse.

Ashley is a student mental health advisor working in a campus university with experience of supporting students with mental health difficulties. In this short video Ashley shares her emotional responses to issues that she finds challenging in her role and how this has been shaped by changes in her personal circumstances.  She also talks about the key signs of emotional distress as well as the draw to and challenges of studying sensitive topics.

Educators experiences of teaching and learning emotionally challenging content

Anne Alvaer (04:18 mins)

Anne is an Associate Lecturer at a distance university who teaches on a range of social science and access modules. In this short video, she talks about the kinds of topics that she finds emotionally challenging to teach and how she deals with her emotional responses. Anne also offers advice for students who are facing emotionally challenging content in their learning.
Ruth Wall (08:19 mins)

Ruth is an Associate Lecturer at a distance university who teaches criminology and social sciences. In this short video, she reflects on the emotional responses that she experienced in her teaching of emotionally challenging topics. Ruth outlines what educators can do to support students to engage with content that is emotionally challenging to study. She offers some advice for people who are going to be teaching and learning emotionally challenging content.

Student-led audio discussion

Student and Associate Lecturer members of the emotional resilience team recorded a discussion of their experiences of teaching and learning emotionally challenging content.

They discussed four key areas:
  • impacts of teaching and learning about emotionally challenging topics
  • strategies and skills to navigate emotionally challenging content
  • benefits of engaging with emotionally challenging content
  • what a higher education that put its duty of care at the centre would look like
    ​
The discussion was facilitated by Ruth Tudor (Associate Lecturer and Postgraduate student at The Open University) with Arabella Cox (undergraduate student at The Open University), Alison Kingan (undergraduate student at The Open University and Vice President Student Support, Open University Student Association 2020-22) and Cinnomen McGuigen (undergraduate student at The Open University and Vice President Education, Open University Student Association 2020-22).

Top tip: You could use these audios and/or questions with students in small group work.

Impacts

(07:38 mins)

​​In this audio the group discusses the question 'How can learning (and/or teaching) about a topic that is sensitive and/or emotive for them impact someone?'
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Strategies and Skills

(19:55 mins)
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​​​In this audio the group discusses the question 'What kinds of strategies and skills can help to navigate sensitive and emotive topics on a course?'
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Benefits

(14:37 mins)
​
​​In this audio the group discusses the question 'What kinds of benefits are there in engaging with sensitive and emotive topics?'
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Duty of care

(10:43 mins)

​​​In this audio the group discusses the question 'What would a higher education that puts its duty of care at the centre look like?'
​

Get in touch

We would love to hear from you! 
​We are very grateful for the educators and students who we will continue to learn with and alongside of. If you are interested in getting in touch, working with us or trialling any of our digital outputs in your teaching, please email our emotional resilience project lead Leigh Downes.

Acknowledgements


​The emotional resilience team: Cath Brown (Associate Lecturer), Arabella Cox (Undergraduate Student), Leigh Downes (Academic Lead), Alison Kingan (Vice President Support, Students Association), Cinnomen McGuigan (Vice President Education, Students Association) Ruth Tudor (Postgraduate Research Student and Student Volunteer Students Association) and Ruth Wall (Associate Lecturer). 

We want to acknowledge the great support and valuable contributions made to the emotional resilience toolkit by: Anne Alvaer, Kyle Andrews, Neill Boddington, Ashley Cave, Nicola Frampton, Gerard Giorgi-Coll, Kate Lister, Sharon Mallon, Dominic Smithies, Janet Sumner, and Steve Tombs.

Finally we give our gratitude to all the students who generously shared their experiences of learning emotionally challenging content with us in the Student Minds Panel and in our research project. None of this would have been possible without you.