Professional and Personal Resilience, various courses available for WUR students or WUR colleagues

Several of ELS’ trainers love to embrace and explore “how to live life” questions as starting points for the education we create and facilitate. The result of one of such endeavours? The modular skills course Professional and Personal Resilience: The Science and Practice of Wellbeing (ELS67800). A training in which we aim to inspire and guide our students to take full ownership of their own resilience. No external answers can be provided to the question how to live your professional and personal life, because a one-size-fits-all-approach simply doesn’t exist. What we do provide, however, is a safe learning community enriched with theories, exercises and tools to experience during our sessions. By adding guided visualization, bodywork (e.g. qigong, yoga) and presencing techniques we consciously composed an educational setting which invites our students to access and apply their cognitive, bodily and emotional wisdom. For their assessment, the course’s participants design and put into practice their own tailor-made strategies to be able to stay true to their own purpose, values, ambitions and qualities, especially in times of uncertainty, challenge and change.

So, what happened when we included this course in WUR’s educational MSc catalogue? From the very first time this course was trained double the amount of students we expected signed up. Each period it is scheduled we welcome more students than the previous one. Evaluative feedback we’ve received has been heartwarming and supportive, indicating the way we train and the topics we address have been missing from education for too long. Students deeply appreciate us – their trainers –being open, honest and vulnerable and connecting with them as equals. Human to human. Heart to heart. We introduce feelings, emotions and reflection as crucial aspects of learning, professionalization and personal development, especially in an academic setting in which many subjects are cognitively approached. Furthermore, many students share they’ve gained a completely new skill, relevant for the rest of their lives and they wish all students could / think all students should join this course. Equally insightful, they emphasize the importance to learn qualities and competences related to living life as an official part of their educational program.

So, what’s next? As we speak we are preparing an elective / extended version, which enables us to broaden and deepen our explorations of resilience. Professional and Personal Resilience: Exploring Your Potential (ELS50303) will be scheduled in academic year 2024-2025 and onwards. This free choice course will be available to BSc and MSc students who are interested in a hands-on approach to future-proof their own professional and personal resilience. Moreover, as various WUR-colleagues have indicated a desire to participate in such a themed course as well, we have been focused on making this happen. So, it is now available to all WUR’s teaching, research and supporting staff interested in this training via Vital@work! Registrations for its first run this June will open on May 15^th, so keep an eye on its associated intranet page, also if you’d like to know more about the course’s content, practicalities, etc.

Would you like to know more about these resilience-focused modules? And / or, are you yourself interested in receiving sessions about resilience and / or related living-life skills? Please contact Ramona.Laurentzen@wur.nl so she can either connect with you herself or connect you with her colleagues at Education and Learning Sciences and / or Wageningen UR.