Stronger Connections | Our Stories of Strength: Using Photovoice to Explore Youth Psychological Strengths and Improve School Climate Transcript

Rebecca Cerna:

Hello and welcome. We will be starting momentarily. Thank you for joining us.

Welcome to today’s webinar. Today’s session will feature an innovative program called Our Stories of Strength. We will share how it draws on Photovoice to explore youth psychological strengths and how it can support school climate improvement. Our speakers will include the designers of the program from Cal State University, Sacramento, who have also conducted research on the impacts of the program. Our speakers also include an educator and two students who have engaged with the program.

My name is Rebecca Cerna. I’m a Senior Director of Safe and Supportive Schools and Communities at WestEd, and I’m also the director of the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. I am going to start off with a couple of virtual Zoom platform notes for us. So for audio help and captions, Alex Breyer, who has the term Zoom host after her name, you can send her a message directly in the chat if you have any Zoom questions. If you need captions, you can find the CC icon or the closed captions icon on your Zoom toolbar, and you can also select view full transcript and open it on the side panel.

So here’s what we can expect with today’s session. Everyone will be muted and the videos will be off except for our speakers. We will be recording the session and it will be posted on the California Department of Education’s California Safe and Supportive Schools website. This session will be one hour. And if you would like to stay on with our speakers, we have an additional 30 minutes today for more information in Q&A with some of our presenters, and we invite you to join us for that as well. Otherwise, you can feel free to add questions in the Q&A feature. So let me just go here to our next slide. So this webinar is being hosted by the California Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. It’s an initiative of the California Department of Ed.

And what you see here is a Zoom poll. We offer technical assistance and webinars to districts and schools across the state, and it’s important for us to learn more about the topics that are important to you. And so we just invite you to fill this out. We’d like to gather your input, capture your input on topics, and also it helps us plan for future webinars that we will be hosting. So we will keep this up for a couple more seconds to give a couple more folks an opportunity to fill this out. We appreciate you doing this.

I’m just going to wait a couple more seconds so that you can fill out your areas, topic areas. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. And we appreciate your input and we’ll use that to help plan our webinars for next school year. So the webinars we’ve host focus on connections. They focus on creating safer spaces for students, for families, and for the adults who support them. So today, our presenters will introduce the concept of Photovoice along with some additional foundational content. They will share the strategy that they implemented, and you will get to engage in an opportunity in a short practice of Photovoice. Then you will learn about key takeaways from an educator and some student participants.

So we have a packed session today. I’m excited now to pass this along to Dr. Meagan O’Malley, professor at California State University, Sacramento. And Dr. O’Malley will do an introduction of the team and herself and get us started. So now I’m going to pass this. Let me pass this along to Dr. O’Malley. Welcome.

Dr. Meagan O’Malley:

Let me get this all shared for you. Everyone can see the slides?

Rebecca Cerna:

Yes. Thanks.

Dr. Meagan O’Malley:

Well, I’m so deeply grateful to be here today with the Excellent WestEd team. All the work they’re doing to coordinate these webinars statewide is a wonderful contribution to education in the state, and then also to the extraordinary team here associated with our Stories of Strength. Today’s presentation is titled Our Stories of Strength: Using Photovoice to Explore Youth Psychological Strengths and Improve School Climate. Just quickly about me, I’m a licensed psychologist and licensed educational psychologist. I am a professor of school psychology at Sacramento State University, where my primary role is to train school psychologists. I maintain an active research lab associated with topics around school climate, school mental health, and student voice. So that research program is something you’ll be learning about today. Importantly, this is our team of wonderful people. We have a couple of researcher clinicians, Dr. Shruthi Swami and Dr. Jeremy Greene.

We have a partner high school teacher, David Wong, and we have two participant researchers, Hadia Ahmad and Tristan Pulicher, all of whom we’ll be presenting today and each of whom will present a little bit about their own biographies before they speak to their program experiences.

If we could just take a quick moment, take your phones out and use this QR code to access the Linktree for this project. At the Linktree, you’ll find the slides for today. You’ll find additional practical materials, just sample materials, not the entire program, but sample materials from the program. And you’ll have links to all of the research book chapters and research articles that we have published related to the Project Our Stories of Strength, as well as some of the underlying philosophy and tenets associated with student voice.

Okay. So just quickly, when you go to that Linktree, you’ll find copies of each one of these articles. There’s a book chapter in the Handbook of Positive Psychology in the Schools, a book chapter on Student Voice, referred to as Student Voice Youth Disrupting Barriers to Achieving the Good Life. So go ahead and check that out. That book chapter is there.

Second is a paper that is called Our COVID Stories: Adolescents Drawing Meaning From a Public Health Crisis Through a Youth Voice Intervention. This is the first manuscript associated with the research you’ll be learning about today. And this most recent one, Our Stories of Strength: A Culturally Responsive Positive Psychology Experience for Adolescents in Schools. This is the article on which two of our participants are also credited authors as both researchers and participants.

Okay. So my role this morning is to talk to you about the philosophy and tenets that underlie the program, Our Stories of Strength.

Our Stories of Strength is rooted in three major pieces, positive psychology, youth voice, and narrative therapy. I’ll go through each of these briefly because I want to make sure we have enough time for you to experience the practical aspects of the project. Yeah. I’ll go through co-vitality, which is our model of psychological strengths, our theoretical model of psychological strengths, Photovoice, and then narrative storytelling, and to a smaller extent, autoethnography.

Okay. So first we derive our source of strength from positive psychology. Positive psychology refers or positive psychology interventions, interventions rooted in positive psychology, are structured activities designed to enhance subjective wellbeing and mitigate psychological distress by fostering positive thoughts, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Positive psychology interventions designed for adolescents have shown some positive treatment outcomes.

Adolescents who have participated in positive psychological interventions report, improved willingness to seek and persist in mental health treatment, improved life satisfaction from baseline pre-treatment to end of treatment, improved optimism, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and improvement in traditional mental health indicators like decreased depression, indicators, decreased anxiety indicators, and decreased suicidal thoughts.

Okay. I think one emphasis I want to make is that given that positive psychology interventions really focus on positive psychology constructs, which I’ll go into next, they tend to have a low sense of threat to adolescents who might fear stigma associated with seeking mental health care. The theoretical construct that we are orienting our stories of strength on is called co-vitality. Co-vitality is a model of the coexistence of psychological strengths among youth. You might think of it as the counter side to comorbidity, which is the coexistence of psychopathology. Here, we think of psychological strengths as tending to coexist. When a young person has one psychological strength, they’re more likely to have two, et cetera.

So early in the 2010s, I was working in a research lab at UC Santa Barbara where we began to think about how these psychological strengths might coexist. And we came up with a theoretical model, which we then tested using quantitative metrics, surveys. And we found that the measurement model and the theoretical model follow this structure where you have individual strengths, optimism, zest, gratitude. Those are associated with a higher order strength that we called engaged living. If you look at the 12 individual strengths or the 16… Yeah, no, 12 individual strengths, then you have the four domains. And then all of these individuals who tend towards having engaged living also tend towards having emotional competence, also tend towards having higher belief in others and belief in self.

And together, those things are referred to as the presence of co-vitality. Individuals, adolescents who report higher levels of co-vitality tend to report higher self-reported grades, decreased loneliness, and decreased suicidal thoughts. One little plug for the California Healthy Kids Survey is it now incorporates items that measure co-vitality. So you can take a look at your school’s social emotional health for the children that take the CHKS in your high schools.

The second piece is youth voice. So the defining features and evidence for youth voice are… Youth voice refers to a heterogeneous group of activities and strategies that together share characteristics. One, they prioritize personal experiences and subjective narratives. They build awareness of oppressive systems and their dynamics, and they incorporate participatory action. As you can see, I have a variety of citations here that indicate the scientific evidence for adolescents participating in activities that involve youth voice strategies. The mechanisms by which participating in youth voice is linked to positive outcomes, include a sense that they increase feelings of control and psychological empowerment. They foster a positive social identity and interpersonal connections. They facilitate meaningful changes in systems such as schools that provide wellbeing related supports and resources. They improve perceptions of psychological empowerment and improved willingness to express well-being needs or mental health needs to school adults.

They increase upstanding behavior by bystanders of bias-based bullying. So they increase helping behaviors and intervening behaviors, and they reduce negative attitudes towards mental health and improved mental health-related help-seeking, as well as improved academic achievement and reduced school absenteeism. Those are some of the outcomes associated with the studies here.

In our Stories of Strength, you’re going to learn about the specific activities we engage in, but one of the key pieces that we use associated with youth voice is something called Photovoice. We use Photovoice because it’s well linked to the adolescent life experience and worldview. We recognize that photos are a part of adolescent daily life. They’re certainly embedded in the culture of adolescence. Every young person has a phone and every young person is engaging and taking photos throughout the day or taking videos throughout the day. So the videos and photos that we use are useful because it allows young people to view their lives from an external frame of reference so they can view a photo as external to themselves. Photos are also helpful for depicting symbols and metaphors that young people may not yet have the vocabulary to describe. They can illustrate past experience, present selves, and even visions of future self, and they can communicate about concepts and life activities such as cultural beliefs and practices that may be otherwise difficult to describe.

You’ll see examples of cultural beliefs and practices that are shared by young people working through our stories of strength. And like I said earlier, they bypass limitations to oral expression. So just meaning young people may not quite have the vocabulary yet to fully communicate the things about themselves they wish to communicate. And so photos are helpful in that way. The last piece that we incorporate into our stories of strength is narrative storytelling. We draw from several literatures related to the history of storytelling and the use of narrative storytelling in education and mental health. We use narrative techniques that come from and are valued and incorporated into both positive psychology and critical education studies that inform youth voice work. Martin Seligman, who’s considered one of the fathers of positive psychology in the United States in his 2002 paper for the American psychologist said, telling the stories of our lives, making sense of what otherwise seems chaotic, distilling and discovering a trajectory in our lives and viewing our lives with a sense of agency rather than victimhood are all powerfully positive.

And then Gloria Ladson-Billings, an influential scholar in culturally relevant pedagogy, said, “Personal realities are constructed and communicated through storytelling to oneself and others, and that through the process of exchanging these stories, individuals impose order on experience and it on them.”

We focus on second stories in our stories of strength. Second stories are the stories of strength and resilience that may underlie or be the counterbalance to stories of trauma and harm. We’re looking to illuminate and refine personal narratives of resilience and empowerment. We’re looking to build narratives around collective support among peers and teachers and school adults, peer support and alliance. We’re looking to combat deficit and illness focused messages around adolescence of which there are many. We’re looking to establish counter narratives of strength that underscore what is right, good, and just with adolescents, and we are looking to emphasize the construction of second stories or alternative stories that privilege overcoming circumstances, resisting harmful social, political and economic forces, and transforming difficult or traumatic life experiences. With that, I will hand it to Dr. Shruthi Swami.

Dr. Shruthi Swami:

All right. Hello, everyone, and thank you, Dr. O’Malley, for the overview of our project and the framework. So as she mentioned, my name is Dr. Shruthi Swami and I work with Dr. Omali as an assistant professor in the School of Psychology MAEDS program at SAC State. I’m also a nationally certified school psychologist working on clinical licensure as well, which is exciting. And in general, my work focuses on the impact of racism and discrimination on the mental health and identity development of racially and ethnically minoritized youths and adolescents, which is one of the big things that attracted me to this project in the first place because I do find that things like narrative therapy, positive psychology are really great tools to help develop some resilience and strategies against racism and discrimination. All right, thank you. Next slide. So I will briefly go through a few strategies related to our stories of strengths, and then I’ll pass it off to our colleague, Dr. Jeremy Green.

Next slide, please. So the first strategy that I will go over is developing strengths, concepts, and vocabulary. So as Dr. O’Malley mentioned, we really want to build the vocabulary of students to be able to talk about their own narratives and be able to talk about their experiences in ways that are personally relevant and meaningful for them. So we use cognitive interviewing techniques to introduce co-vitality terms and covidality, as Dr. O’Malley mentioned, is the framework of the topics that we will be talking about. We talk about the specific names and definitions for each strength and then facilitate discussions so that each of the terms that we’re using are meaningful to the students and contextualize within their own experiences. So next slide, please.

So here is an example of the worksheet that we may use when we are guiding these discussions with the students that we’re working with. And you can kind of see a picture over here of one of our previous graduate student facilitators moderating this discussion where we’ll hand this worksheet out and you can see on the leftmost column, we have the actual term of the co-vitality strength, and then we give them a definition of how adults might define the strength and then facilitate a discussion around, well, how would you define the strength?

So for example, for the first term above, we have emotional regulation, in which we would say this is defined by adults as effectively expressing one’s positive emotion, such as happiness and managing one’s negative emotions. And so next slide, please.

And so then we would have participants themselves have a discussion around, well, okay, this is what we as adults think that emotional regulation may be. This is how psychologically we define it. But when you think of those terms together and separately, what might you come up with? And so these are some examples that students have given us around when they think of that term, what does that mean? So things like emotional intelligence, being articulate emotionally, understanding emotions at a deeper level as opposed to face value, being able to bounce back, expressing positive and negative emotions. And so you can see that students are really insightful about what they kind of see. And so I think, yes, and I see in the chat, adults and we love the contextual practice. Absolutely. So we want to make sure that aligned with narrative therapy techniques as well, we provide students with the language that is meaningful to them to talk about their own experiences at the end of the day.

Next slide, please. All right. So the second strategy that we use is Co-Vitality Self-Report, Survey Data Examination. So of course, as researchers, practitioners, we want to make sure that the programs that we’re implementing are effective. So on one hand, we do collect that data to make sure that we are delivering something that is not wasting students’ times, that is not harmful at the end of the day, but we’re also moving away not only from data extraction, but to data empowerment for students as well. And so we use these surveys that I will show you on the next slide for self-reflection and for self-determination for students. And we want to foster reflection on, okay, you fill this survey out, what did you actually indicate? And I think this program is really unique in that we don’t always have that structured time to go through with students.

Well, what did you fill out on the survey? What does this mean? What does it look like for you to have indicated? Actually, I’m showing a lot of depressive symptoms and it’s so powerful for me to see that written out on a paper. So next slide, please.

Thank you. So we use the 36-item Social Emotional Health Survey Secondary, the SEHS2020, and it can be found at our Linktree as well. And so you’ll see that some of the questions that are shown here, they’re kind of across different domains linked to co-vitality as well, so related to self-efficacy, awareness, persistence, et cetera. And we go through these individual questions with the students in terms of overall self-efficacy scores and also debrief individual questions that they might’ve taken. And part of that discussion facilitation looks like after you see the results, did you feel the results accurately depicted your experience? Why or why not? Is there an area where you feel especially strong? What helps you feel that way, et cetera? And you can see a few more of the questions listed here, but really this is a really great way to empower students to understand like, wow, I actually have a lot of strengths and I didn’t realize that until I actually filled out the survey.

So we find that to be really a powerful tool there. And then it also helps connect as we go forward, if it’s in a group curriculum setting or whatnot, what are the things that we want to be oriented towards, whether it’s as facilitators and for the students themselves to think about as we move forward as well. With that, I will pass it on to Dr. Jeremy GreenE.

Dr. Jeremy DeWayne Greene:

Good morning, y’all. So my name is Dr. Jeremy DeWayne Greene. I am a school psychologist by trade, but currently an assistant professor at the University of Pacific and Stockton, as well as an adjunct lecturer here at Sacramento State University with my colleagues. Just like you know, you can see the theme is really about just with my research and my life story, trying to liberate through transformative means, through narrative, people’s stories, trying to uplift, trying to empower and so forth through that narrative approach. So always got to go back to the roots in terms of love for siblings, love for parents, love for the love of my life, and love for the family in Louisiana and my nephew, Luca. So you can go ahead and switch that to the next slide.

So as we see, really one of the main strategies that we’re really incorporating is Photovoice. So narrative 101. So whether that’s poetry, whether that’s creative arts, whether that’s theater arts and so forth too, really empowering students to be able to tell their story through various means what often they’re not able to do within a traditional academic setting. So the thing that we utilize today in terms of our research is Photovoice, capturing images in these days and times to capture the phenomenon of being a student in these days and times. So that’s pretty much what we use to try to collectively make meaning around the strengths concepts that we’ll be talking on in a little bit as well. You can go ahead.

So it’s iterative in terms of this process. We have group members select a photo from either something they took a picture of in terms of a prompt, something in their phone preexisting around one of these strength-based concepts that we’ll discuss. Group members look at the picture and then try to figure out, okay, what’s the first thing that I notice in the picture? What do I see? What is this story trying to tell me and so forth too? Related to that group concept, whether that’s optimism, whether that’s zest, whether that’s any times of strength-based positive psychology 101 concept. Step three, person who shared then describes what is the photo facilitator will ask, why did you pick this picture to share? Did the ideas about this picture grow after you heard your peers try to describe why they thought you picked the picture? Then the person, the next person shares this picture.

Go back to step one, where that person who originally shared their picture discusses the reasons why. Why did I choose this picture? Why does it incorporate optimism in my opinion, in my life, things of that nature too? You can go ahead and share to the next slide.

Oh, I think he’s good. There we go. Perfect. So then we have that peer witnessing. So group talks about these questions around the picture. What are some things we share in common based on the picture, the things we talked about, things we learned from each other? What might we be looking for when we think or insert that next strength word this week and so forth? So again, trying to come up with shared language, shared concepts, understanding community in relation to, okay, we all have these strengths. We all have these positive attributes. We all are in the pursuit of happiness and joy and laughter and love, right?

So we all see similar themes that come from that in the pictures that we have collected over our lifespan and based on the prompts that we present during these collective reflection, peer witnessing. You can go ahead and share the next one.

So then we turn to our environments. We try to think about how our environment might be able to encourage the strengths that we’re trying to nurture that these students have identified existing in their life, but let’s amplify that. Amplify that voice through that photo element and so forth too. Go ahead and go to the next one.

So as a strengths ecology. So what we try to do is try to follow an ecological analysis model where participants are given prompts to help integrate the social forces operating at different levels of their social ecology. So we go inward, outward, outward, inward, all iterative, if you will. So we ask them to make these master described parts of their lives at school, home in the community. So the micro, the mess or the macro to help to try to grow and amplify their strengths or detract from things that might be bothering them in their lives as well. You can go ahead and try that next one.

Thank you. So we won’t read all of this. This is just kind of an example how students get outside of the classroom setting. Man on the street, grad students with facilitators, with the high school students walking around trying to find people to define the word, what does optimism mean to you? So for example, what it means to you, direct students respond with validation in terms of whatever those people that they find outside of their classroom setting on school campus might say and turn the definition of words. Once the students have talked to at least one person going back in terms of you can keep going if the students seem excited, but going back to the classroom setting and then to talking about and debriefing around, how has that walk for you around the concept of optimism? What were some unexpected responses? Just try to collaborate not only with their peers inside, but having them be co-constructors of knowledge, AKA many researchers in their way by talking with other individuals as well.

You can go ahead. So adult witnessing is a big part of this. So composing our stories of strength, we want to share those stories of strength with hopefully adult allies, trusted adults to come in and listen and learn from the students who are experts on their lived experiences. You can go ahead with the next one. So one of the examples we can do with that, inviting adults into the space, obviously working through some protocols, accepted norms and so forth too. One of the ways that we did it was creating collages. So just simple enough, whether that’s a pallet, whether that’s on Google or anything of the sort, I’m just creating collages that represent whatever you define in terms of that definition of a positive psychology model. In this case was the stories of strength, and you see some examples right there as well.

So then we have a gallery walk where people are able to look and walk around in terms of our adult witnesses to see the collages that these students have created. Outside the witnesses engage with one another in conversation, allowing the students to be the experts on their lived experiences through the collages and the positive strength words they’re defining as well. And with that, I think you go to the next slide and it’s back to my friend. Go ahead. Thank you so much, y’all.

Dr. Shruthi Swami:

Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Greene. So now I’m going to guide us through a very abbreviated version of this activity. And so as we’re going through it, I’ll direct you all to put a few things in the chat, but as you’re seeing it, if you have any reactions or questions or thoughts, I definitely encourage you to put more things into the chat as well. Okay? So we’re going to go ahead and try it out. Thank you. Next slide.

So the word for today for our session is going to be gratitude. And so typically you would provide an overview of what to expect when you’re working with students. So you might say something like, “I’m going to ask you a question about a word and then we’ll look at photos that we feel represent that word to learn about how each person thinks about that word.”

And so typically we might’ve done this the week before and gone through that worksheet of this is the adult definition of gratitude and then have students generate their own definitions as well. And so that’s listed in these next steps below. And then you basically prompt students to take pictures, think about the word gratitude throughout the week, and then come to the next session, depending on how you structure it, with a picture related to the word gratitude. And so you can say, you can take a brand new picture. Ideally, we try to encourage students to take a brand new picture, but sometimes that doesn’t happen, which is all right. So then we say, “If you feel comfortable, look into your phone’s photo role to find a photo that depicts what gratitude means to you.” And there’s additional ways that we can support students if they’re not comfortable sharing their own photos.

So for all of us today, think about the word gratitude and what that means. Next slide. And so what I would do as a facilitator potentially, I would share a picture. So you all get a picture here and I wouldn’t tell you anything about this picture. And ideally I would pass this picture around to folks in the group. And so what I’m going to do very briefly now is I see a few of my colleagues have their camera on. So imagine that I just passed this picture over to Tristan. I see your camera on right below me. So basically next slide please. All right. So Tristan would answer some of these questions when he saw my photo. So Tristan, if you’d like to share anything that you notice.

Tristan Pulicher:

Yeah, absolutely. So some things I noticed about this picture is that it seems like obviously a group of people. I can make an assumption here that these may be Dr. Swami’s parents. That’s the thing that I notice that comes to my mind. It seems like we’re on a walk, for example, it’s sunny out. And this can really, in my mind, it leads to gratitude because family dynamics can be very important in people’s lives, especially in my life and people around me. And yeah, it looks like this really represents gratitude.

Dr. Shruthi Swami:

Great. Thank you, Tristan. So then I might pass it off to… Yes, thank you. Three people are smiling. Oh, I love seeing these observations in the chat as well. Everyone is smiling, assuming everyone is happy. So then we would take this picture and then Tristan would pass it off to the next person who would continue to share a little bit more. And the person at the front seems proud and happy. Great. Thank you.

All right. So then next slide, please. I see they look healthy and relaxed. Great. So then the person who shares then describes their photo. And as the facilitator, if say I was facilitating for another student, I might ask, “Why did you pick this picture to share? And then did your ideas about this picture grow or change after hearing from others?” So I might share something like, yes, this is a picture of me taking a walk with my parents when they recently came to visit me.

I feel very grateful to have been able to engage in this. And then I might share in really the context to this is that my parents are making a international move back to India. So I feel very grateful to have this time to spend with them before I don’t have as close of access, because right now they live very close by. So I might share that. And then did my ideas about this picture grow or change? And one thing that I would say, kind of looking at what folks have mentioned and what Tristan has mentioned too, of just being, again, grateful for my family, being outside in a sunny spot, being very grateful to have access to nature and being able to take walks like this. And yeah, I do feel proud of my parents as well. I think somebody mentioned that in the chat.

So we have many different ways that our definitions of gratitude might change as we share these pictures and hear what other people also reflect back to us, which I think is a really nice practice as well. Next step, please, or next slide.

Dr. Meagan O’Malley:

Before you proceed, can I ask you, how did your experience of your own picture change or grow as a consequence of hearing?

Dr. Shruthi Swami:

Sure, absolutely. So yeah, well, one thing was that I was like, oh my gosh, I feel pressure to share the perfect picture in front of this webinar. And then I was like, “You know what? It’s okay.” Especially as you develop the relationship with the others in the group, you might feel more comfortable to share things. And then also just hearing a little bit from Tristan and knowing the other folks that are on this webinar with us, that they also know a little bit more about my background and my life. So really feeling open to hearing input from other folks about what might be going on in the picture and also growing that a little bit more to think about, okay, what does it mean to spend time with my family given things that I’ve heard from other folks about their own experiences? Thanks, Dr. O’Malley.

All right, next slide. Okay. So as Dr. Greene went over in his slides right before this, then you would pass the baton on to the next person who would share their picture in the same format. Then everyone will follow the same set of steps from steps one to three. And then after everyone’s had a chance to share their photos, we would have a collective reflection. And so we might ask things based on the pictures we looked at, what are some of the things we share in common based on these pictures or some of the themes that came up that we have talked about? And oftentimes we might find that we keep coming back to this theme of family, personal relationships, not realizing that there are all these things that are strengths that might support us as well. And then we might say, “What are some things that we’ve learned about each other?”

And we might say, “I never knew that your parents were moving here.” Or when we did this with Mr. Wong’s classes, he’ll talk about in a little bit, we had a few students who had known each other since ninth grade and they’re now in 12th grade and had been in the same class. And they’re like, “Wow, I’ve known you for three years, three and a half years, and I never knew that about you.” So I think it’s really a nice way for students to connect with each other a little bit more, learn more about each other and have this collective processing of the different experiences that we have. And then you might ask a question too, what might we be looking for when we think of blank this week? So gratitude or the next concept that you’ll talk about. And so next slide please.

So we may not have too much time to go through this in depth, but as we move on to the next presenter who will be Tristan, I would love for you all, as you’re hearing him talk, hearing Mr. Wong and hearing Hadia talk as well, if you would be able to share in the chat just some reflections of what it was like to see this activity shared in a super short format, any benefits that you see, any ways that you think that this could be adapted or downsides to implementation as well or barriers as well.

But with that, I’m going to pass it over to Tristan. Thank you all.

Tristan Pulicher:

Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Tristan Pulicher. I am an Irish endophygian student in my senior year of college at California State University Northridge. I’ll be graduating in August with a degree in psychology, and I intend to pursue a career centered on helping those facing systemic barriers in a meaningful way. I have a great deal of passion for community service as well as mental health framed in the context of societal pressures and obstacles. So I was involved in student voices or our stories of strength as a researcher/participant beginning in 2022 during my sophomore year of high school. I was also accredited as a co-author on a study recently published in the Journal of Prevention and Intervention in the Community. This project was a unique and impactful opportunity for me to sort of flesh out my jumbled adolescent understanding of myself, the world around me, and of academia.

I worked closely with Dr. O’Malley, Dr. Greene, Dr. Swami, and as well as my peers to enrich my understanding of teenage mental health and in an increasingly complicated and uncertain world. And portions of this research, including the focus on mindfulness, grounding and stopping to take in what passes many of us by really just set my heart ablaze regarding my interest in mental health treatment and psychological ailments that affect so many people around the world. Being able to learn and to research with my peers as well as the professionals was integral to my academic and internal growth. And at that point in my life, during that time in high school, I feel like I had hit a ceiling within my personal development and student voices gave me the tools and experiences that I needed to mature into the next stage of my life.

And from a young age, I had witnessed many confusing family dynamics and mental health problems within my own inner circle. And as a result, I had many internal thoughts and feelings around the topic of human psychology. And the activities that we did in student voices such as Photovoice helped me make sense of my jumbled ideas about what it meant to be a stable, loving human being. And being 16 years old and in the middle of my formative years prior to adulthood, I acquired guidance and knowledge from student voices as well as Photovoice about how to live a good life. And after moving to Los Angeles to attend Santa Monica College, I really carried the teachings and experiences from this project with me into my schooling and my work and also my personal life.

And the foundation for my career plans and my way of life can be found in a small classroom in Sacramento where I was able to connect with others, learn about psychological research and above all else to really build who I was becoming as a young person and to decide what type of conduct and energy I was going to exhibit into the world.

And had I not had this opportunity to enhance my comprehension of social connections, academic research, developmental psychology, and the importance of being present in the moment, my life could have gone down a very different path that would’ve caused me a lot of trouble, that I was lucky enough to avoid because of the gifts that this experience gave me. So thank you so much, and I think I’m going to hand it off to Hadia now.

Hadia Ahmad:

Hi, everybody. My name’s Hadia Ehmed. I’m a second year undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I’m currently pursuing a triple major in legal studies, psychology and sociology. I’m also a first generation Pakistani American student, and my academic interests center on the intersections of law, mental health, and social inequality with a focus on understanding how systematic factors impact diverse communities. And about this experience, you can go to the next slide, please. Thank you so much. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this experience. Looking back, it’s definitely been a crucial part of both my academic and my personal growth. After COVID as a second year high school student, I feel like I was just trying to navigate how to return to school and society while everything felt so uncertain. There was so much pressure to go back to a normal, but it was hard to define what normal even meant anymore.

And during this period of confusion and adjustment, I was introduced to this research opportunity in my school and immediately felt drawn to it. Having a space where I could regularly speak with professional mentors and reflect each week was incredibly healing. It also allowed me to build meaningful connections with my peers, and this research created a safe and supportive environment on campus for me, and it helped me become more mindful in my daily life. I found myself focusing on positive qualities such as self-awareness, emotional regulation, and optimism throughout the week, instead of being so pessimistic. And I’ve never really been much of an open book, but this project definitely helped me learn how to get out of my comfort zone and open up while also being able to reflect and process my emotions, which I feel like I’m also working on right now in college. And through this experience, I just learned on how to feel more grounded and comfortable at school.

And high school can be so overwhelming, and there’s so many moments that left me feeling so uncertain and anxious about this program gave me the tools to engage in self-reflection, which is something I continue to carry with me today. And one of the most impactful lessons I took away was the importance of capturing and sharing experiences through photos. And even now, when I reconnect with my friends from my hometown, I often share moments from my camera and reflect on them together and use those images as a way of process and communication with my experiences and emotions. And that’s also, it helps jog my memory and helps me explain to my friends like, “Oh, this is how I felt in this moment.” I can connect my feelings to certain photos. And I genuinely believe it’s so, so, so important for students to have spaces that encourage self-reflection and personal growth on campus.

And I’m deeply grateful to have had this opportunity and especially thankful for the researchers and mentors who supported and guided me through this journey. Thank you so much.

Dr. Meagan O’Malley:

Thank you so much.

David Wong:

Good morning, everybody.

Dr. Meagan O’Malley:

Oh, okay. There you are. Okay, great. Thanks, Tristan and Hadia. Wonderful, wonderful reflections. And now we have David Wong.

David Wong:

Morning, everybody. So I am the kind of educator classroom teacher component. I know some of you were asking about what does this look like in terms of implementing it on the actual school site. So a little bit about me. I’ve been teaching for about 25 years, mostly in English language arts, transitioned from there to an instructional coach, and then now I’m currently at my school site as a AVID coordinator and elective teacher. So during this time, I’m mostly focused with underserved, high risk, high needs students, but I’m always excited about processes of bringing in social emotional learning skills to students, not only just bringing them academically, but really focusing on that emotional aspect that many of us already kind of spoke about because once they leave the high school level or even coming out of it, I think that’s the most important thing that can build upon in order to survive and build upon themselves as you go into adulthood.

So I was really fortunate to be a part of this program and they were able to come into the Youth Voice was able to come into my classroom serving my 12th grade AVID students. And what was mentioned before was that I’m fortunate enough that in my AVID curriculum here at my school site, I run 9th-12th. So most of these students are in the same classroom, at least with their AVID elective from 9th-12th. They build this kind of capacity with each other, they build the capacity with me. But I would say by adding in this youth voice program into it, the students were able actually to go even further, which was kind of the best thing that I could see from this program. I really saw an impact that happened immediately. Thank you. The students became more vocal and consistent over time.

Now, my top students who were always the most participating in everything, really vocal, they were the first ones to jump on board and really embrace the process. I wasn’t too surprised by that. I really enjoyed the structure that was given to them of mixing this academic language with, “This is about me.” And as some of my other colleagues have shared that, my students consistently always said, “I didn’t know that about you. ” And this bonding experience. And even for myself as a teacher, seeing them outside of the classroom environment and what that looked like and what their lives looked like outside my classroom was really impactful and made this kind of strong connection amongst each other and with me. But what I was most impressed by in this process was when some of these star students were absent or maybe were kind of on a down day and weren’t speaking, my quieter, more reserved, thoughtful students stepped up and they became leaders in these sessions and really started to talk and share.

And that to me was kind of the most impactful, was really seeing my quieter, more reserved students step out of their comfort zones and really use and embrace this language to share with each other.

And then going on with that, at the end of the process with Youth Voice, we had that collage and that share out. And so I had an open classroom. I invited other students and other teachers to come into my classroom while the students did a gallery walk and shared it all out. And that would be, again, a culminating, solidifying moment for myself and the teachers and the students about this program is because we learned so much about each other. And it was a bonding moment for these other classroom teachers to come in and have this one moment in 30 minutes and learn something about these students that they didn’t know before, learn about their lives outside the classroom, what their families look like, the things that were going on, the things they were light on as strengths. And that’s something I never really seen done in any program before, whether it’s through PBIS, SEL or anything like that.

And so it was really impactful and I feel really fortunate to be part of this program and hopefully continue it on with my other students as we go on. And then lastly, I want to touch on the curriculum part that was brought up earlier was how do you implement this in the classroom? As a classroom teacher, I would really recommend having teachers be involved only because this lets the students see their teachers outside of that and also lets teachers themselves see their students in a different light. And that’s what, again, builds that community bond and strengthens it even more. And I know as a classroom teacher, we can be really protective of our curriculum and our time, but I really didn’t feel this was taking anything away. I think because even though it was implemented once a week, I felt that the students’ growth and their capacity to relate to one another only helped and translated into our actual curriculum.

When I had classroom discussions about academic discussions and readings and other things, it just strengthened that even more, I think because it built this closeness that the students already had. So then they weren’t scared or reserved to step out of their academic boundary and take risk academically in front of each other. So I’ll definitely be here afterwards too as well to take more questions about implementing it within the classroom. But as a 25-year vet and seeing a lot of programs come in and out and complaining about a lot of programs coming in out, this was probably the easiest program that I was able to implement in my classroom and by far the most impactful in such a short amount of time. Thank you.

Dr. Meagan O’Malley:

All right. There’s a part of me that would just like to end there because those reflections are more powerful than any of these research findings that I could share with you, but just as a… Sorry, it sounded like maybe I was muted for a second. I was just saying that I’d really love to stop there because I think the reflections that we just heard are more powerful than any research findings. That said, I’ll just go over a couple of the findings that are written in this publication down here on the bottom.

By looking at artifacts and field notes from our work on this project, we found that our themes are building intentional community, embracing vulnerability, developing mindful presence, developing agency and confidence and courage, reflecting on adult allyship, exploring the narrated identity, and considering the future and the nature of change. That last one really is a piece of the high school experience towards the latter end of the high school experience, is thinking about what’s next and the scary part of what’s next, also about what strengths you bring into the future with you and that you can build on to build an environment that like Hadia and Tristan have done for themselves.

Despite going into a new and scary environment, they’ve built supportive structures for themselves to continue to thrive.

We found that students who participate generally report liking the intervention. Clinically, we call that treatment acceptability. Students who participate report positive indicators of wellbeing based on the survey data that we have, teachers who participate ask us to come back like Mr. Wong, and our preliminary results suggest further study is warranted. So we do have all of our preliminary results, but we are looking to move forward on doing some kind of more rigorous like quasi-experimental design with this program.

So that brings us to our contact information. If you would like to be in contact with Tristan or Hadia, please email me and I will connect with them as appropriate to give you access to them. I just wanted to make sure their personal emails weren’t in such a public space. So with that, I think we are ready for Q&A.

Rebecca Cerna:

Yes. So I am going to, before we go into Q&A, I do want to absolutely thank all of our presenters. We appreciate all of your voices today to help us as audience really learn more about you as individuals, to learn more about the program, the grounding around it, how you engaged in collective reflection that you mentioned, the collective reflection process, and to really hear those stories of impact. So especially those from the students, the college students from Mr. Wong, it’s very helpful to really learn more about how this is really impacting individuals on the level of students and in the classroom level. And this is really a great example of connections. And I saw a couple of individuals in the chat just mentioning how this was so helpful. And on this slide, one of the things that we need to capture is feedback. So we appreciate those of you who have already engaged in our feedback poll.

It’s just a quick couple of questions, three questions that we need to capture from all of you. And the link is either in the chat or there’s the QR code on the screen. If you can fill out those three questions for us, we appreciate it. And as we… I’m going to move on to the next slide. I think if it lets me with the Zoom poll, let me see if it does. Yes. Okay. So I do want to share very quickly that we have a couple of upcoming events. So we do have another webinar coming up later this month about promoting attendance and reducing chronic absenteeism, where we will hear from a school district Hawthorne. And every month during the school year, we have a mini wellness mini sessions. And our last one for this school year is May 13th, and we will have someone from San Bernardino County Office of Education leading us through a session.

And these are 20 minutes. These are bite-sized mini wellness sessions. And May 21st, we have a webinar on creating supportive conditions for staff wellbeing, and that’s going to be led by someone from Orange County Department of Ed and a principal in Southern California. And feel free to visit our website at Stronger Connections, and the QR code is there and also in the chat so that you could register and learn more about those. And we have one more slide. You can stay connected with us. We’re going to stop recording and we are going to engage in a Q&A session and feel free to also maintain contact with us at [email protected].