A UVM blog Social, Emotional, Behavioral Health and Inclusive Education (SHIE) Graduate Student Blog

Back in November 2023, our SHIE cohort decided to write and present a research paper at the New England Educational Research Organization (NEERO) conference in April 2024. We are excited to announce that we have submitted our paper!

The project required collaboration, communication, and commitment from each team member. We connected daily through text messages, virtual meetings, and in-person work sessions to cross the finish line. In the end, we have a conceptual paper that makes us feel proud, and a bit relieved, to have finished.

The paper focuses on our collaborative efforts to inspire future research and practice. In it, we identify concerns around social-emotional and behavioral health (SEBH) for students. Seemingly, these concerns have swelled in recent years. Teacher attrition, implicit bias in our education systems, and a weak interdisciplinary approach make a difficult situation worse. So, we prioritize promoting equity, celebrating diversity and cultivating cultural humility and inclusive, multi-cultural practices in education. In our paper, we emphatically support authentic inclusion and humbly suggest that it reflects equitable status and position relative to all aspects of education including social connectedness and belonging coupled with high-quality instruction.

Within our writing we commit to research, policy, and practice recommendations that revolve around student dignity and justice. We identify key themes to center students including supporting critical inclusion, supporting educators, utilizing systemic educational practices, and leaning on humanistic, developmental, and eco-social theories. In short, we believe that research can inspire educational policy and practice to address students’ social emotional health and improve educational outcomes.

With the paper submitted, we now turn our attention to the presentation! We will continue our collaborative efforts over the next few weeks to create a PowerPoint presentation. Within the presentation we will include a fresh, unique conceptual model that aligns with the vision laid out in our paper. QR codes will also be integrated throughout the presentation to offer alternate modalities, provide quick access to information, and link to this blog.

Overall, writing our paper for NEERO has been a growing experience. Our advisors in the SHIE program were great to let us “have at it” while providing much-needed scaffolding at critical junctures. In other words, we had few limits with plentiful support. This promoted intellectual freedom and creativity. More importantly, it gave us authentic ownership in the project.

Yes, our paper has been submitted! It has been a collective effort to get here. Now, we will prepare for the presentation in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

This is the Blog for the PhD in Social Emotional Behavioral Health and Inclusive Education (PhD in SHIE) at the University of Vermont, College of Education and Social Sciences.

The Project RESILIENCY scholars of the inaugural cohort of the newly minted PhD in Special Education focused on Social Emotional and Behavioral Health and Inclusive Education (PhD in SHIE) are in the second semester of being all together as students on campus. In addition to our exciting coursework in Prevention Science Theory, Research Methods, Critical Issues is SEBH Policy, each scholar is engaging in supporting various faculty on a variety of research projects, teaching, reviewing licensure portfolios, and/or developing their own research questions, literature bases, writing practices and styles.

One thing we have found so far is that there is strength in numbers and we are better together. Almost instantly when we arrived on campus last autumn, a text chain was established, and we began our friendships and colleagueship. We text often throughout our days and weeks, about life, and school, and what the printer code is. We share GIFs to lighten the stress, we ask genuine questions and share resources and links. We give each other heads up when our mics are unmuted during our online classes, we remind each other in which room we are meeting. We check in when something extra is going on for any one of us. Which happens. Life happens. Through intentional care and communication, we are establishing an academic community rooted in relationships.

We are currently working on writing and presenting a research paper about how the collaborative efforts of this intentionally interdisciplinary team will evolve ideas and research and practice that could not have been created by any one of us alone. Our team comes from professional and personal backgrounds intentionally chosen to give us a variety of lenses through which to view the thorny issues in SEBH/SpEd/Higher Ed/Policy/ and public health.

We have been in a phase of self-organizing as we begin collaboration on writing and researching together. We have established weekly meetings during which our team meets to work on our “projects.” We spend time getting to know each other more, building relationships, and sharing ideas. We are currently using a shared leadership model, in which we intentionally rotate facilitation roles each week. We decided to begin our work together by zooming out, before we dive in. We spent almost a whole meeting giving each of us the floor to share about our knowledge base, hopes and dreams, and focuses of interest. We are also reading each other’s theoretical inventories, written as final papers for Prevention Science Theory last semester, and reconvening around the start of a theoretical compendium. Our current goals are multiple: write a paper about the intentional de-siloing of the fields of mental health, social work, public health and special and general education, prepare to present said paper at the New England Educational Research Association conference in April, produce this blog, move our paper forward into a publishable compendium intentionally linking multiple theoretical frameworks to support the social emotional and behavioral health of students, teachers and staff in the fields of special education.  Big tasks, but we are together, we are supported, and we got this.

The SHIE blog will publish monthly on the goings on of the students in the PhD SHIE program, as well as periodic pop-up images and notes for fun. If you have any questions for us, don’t hesitate to comment below. If you are interested in learning more about the program, check out this link: