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The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the student mental health crisis in Higher Education (HE), and how resilience and grit, two important positive psychological constructs, can be beneficial for university students’ success and wellbeing. As part of a discussion around some of the current approaches to intervening in wellbeing in universities, the chapter provides evidence for the use of PPIs for wellbeing in university students, alongside some of the challenges of implementing these in HE. It also provides an overview of the Thriving Students Framework and presents a case for a multicomponent approach to monitoring and improving educational success. In particular, a wellbeing framework that, alongside resilience, also recognises the importance of strengths, persistence in the face of difficulty, a growth mindset, self-control and mental wellbeing; Academic Tenacity. The implications of utilising this framework for educational attainment in university students are discussed. The Bolton Uni-Stride Scale (BUSS), a single short measure of academic tenacity that combines the attributes enabling measurement and intervention to support university students to thrive, is also presented for educators to use.

When it comes to special education, teachers are the cornerstone of children's development. A special education teacher (SET) who possesses correct perceptions to teach students with special education needs (SENs) in inclusive education and ability to maintain balance that works best for children with physical and emotional disabilities are expected to thrive. This requires several skills that are entirely different from traditional teaching, often depicted as ‘chalk and talk’ – keeping control and making decisions about what is the right thing to do for students. This trait is just an illustration of many myopic characteristics that will no longer work well for both SENs and regular students. An effective SET in the twenty-first century must be able to adapt and respond rapidly to the changing society and is more likely to be open to learning. These character qualities are typical among millennials and Generation Z or Alpha, who are more prone to be digital native, that will future-proof them in the upcoming era of ubiquitous technology. As such, new generation SETs are significant precursor to create a new special education system that responds well to the challenges encountered by the pervasive future ahead.

This chapter shares the challenges that scholars experienced during the pandemic and their responses to them. We find that participants responded to complex work and home challenges through ethics of grit and perseverance. Offering a caution against grit mindsets, we argue that academics would benefit from opportunities to develop fuller forms of resilience. To do so, we recommend that higher education institutions co-construct locally and culturally relevant conceptualisations of resilience and enact trauma-informed practice to better support academic resilience in their faculties.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

This chapter proposes a conceptualization of joyful leadership as a unique leadership style and identifies a future research agenda to further explore the concept. While the concept of joyful leadership appears repeatedly in the nonacademic literature, including in blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, there is limited reference to joyful leadership in the academic literature highlighting a lack of academic rigor around the concept. Joyful leadership is proposed as a unique leadership style with specific patterns of behavior demonstrated by the leader. This research draws on understandings of emotion, positive affect, and leadership in the academic literature to develop a conceptualization of joyful leadership.

The proposed conceptualization is based on an extensive literature review drawing from both the leadership field and the study of emotions including various theoretical perspectives from these diverse fields.

Based on discrete emotion theory a conceptualization of joyful leadership as a unique leadership style is presented, identifying key patterns of behavior associated with joyful leadership including discrete autonomic patterns, actions, nonverbal signals, and identified feelings.

This research outlines a conceptual model to provide an understanding of the concept of joyful leadership as a unique leadership style. It draws on the current study of emotion, positive affect, and leadership and more specifically examines the concept of joyful leadership aligned to discrete emotion theory. This particular theory of emotion, when examined in relation to leadership, provides a basis for the concept of joyful leadership as a leadership style and the basis for its proposed characteristics and outcomes.