Mental Health Special Issue Introduction

Abstract

Our call for proposals for this issue on “Mental Health in the Classroom” came before COVID, when mental health was a looming concern that the global pandemic only exacerbated. At that time, I had been learning a lot about mental health through my volunteer work with an organization in my New Jersey suburban community, “Montclair Bounce: A Creative Project to Build Community and Resilience” (https://www.montclairbounce.org/). The organization is affiliated with a thriving local food pantry and describes a vision of “a community of neighbors utilizing accessible resources and enriching practices to bolster their emotional health, benefiting themselves, their families, their neighborhoods, the township and beyond.” My participation in Bounce included many new experiences for me such as helping to make an interactive map where community members shared locations in the town that made them feel good, participating in a workshop on play (for adults), and attending talk on understanding anxiety among adolescents. I was surprised by how much I had to learn about mental health and the related stigma around mental health struggles, and I was left reflecting on how important this topic is for new educators. This was not an altogether new understanding. I had learned in the beginning of my career that mental health is closely related to education, in all communities, but particularly in the areas of the country that are most economically marginalized. In the mid-1990s, I ran a tutoring program for children affected by HIV and AIDS in a multidisciplinary clinic in New York City. Every week the clinic held a case presentation about one of the clinic’s clients, we would examine the client’s family genealogy, and different clinicians and educators who worked the person or a family member would report on their progress. Case workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and educators all worked together, and through this experience I was able to see how integrated mental health, health, housing, poverty and other aspects of the families’ lives influenced the children’s school experiences. This critical learning experience has informed many of the ways I have come to understand topics in teacher education such as classroom management and working with families. For this reason, the call for manuscripts for this special issue invited educators – using our usual broad definition of “educator” that includes classroom teachers, administrators, counselors, support staff, teacher educators, and those who educate outside of school settings – to join in on the conversation regarding what it means to be aware of and support mental health in the classroom. THE NEW EDUCATOR 2021, VOL. 17, NO. 3, 219–222 https://doi.org/10.1080/1547688X.2021.1953904