Thinking About Curriculum While Not Thinking About Work

I’ve been on leave for a couple of weeks. I go back to work next Monday.

I’ve made a fairly concerted effort during the break not to think about work. Some days: gloriously triumphant (what is work??). Other days: abject failure (angrily reading emails).

But honestly, I generally don’t get annoyed at myself for thinking about work. (Checking emails? Absolutely not. Don’t check emails.)

Thinking about work on a break often gives my brain a chance to process the stuff it’s been avoiding while I’m in the thick of it. And the dominant topic my mind wandered to this time was…

The Growing Role of Support Services in Curriculum

If you’re in support services in higher education, you may have noticed a significant shift over the past decade.

Support services (e.g. counselling, disability services, student learning, careers, international student support, wellbeing teams) used to sit neatly outside the curriculum. We might pop up for a guest lecture, remind students of our existence, then disappear again into the background.

If students needed us, they came to us. We were generally separate from their studies.

That still happens but increasingly support services are stepping into the curriculum.

I’d say we are ‘teaching’ but the term that is often used is “supporting learning” and in practice it means embedding parts of what we do inside topics.

And for me, this has been some of the most enjoyable parts of my role. For example, I created a short MindSpot Big 5 for Mental Health video series and embedded it into a first-year psychology topic, giving students both a public-health lens on mental health and practical strategies they can use for their own wellbeing. I also just finished delivering a 12-part Mental Health in Practice series for rural allied health students which simultaneously discusses mental health self-care from both professional and personal perspectives. And we (collaborator Tam and I) have a behaviour-change sub-topic for physiotherapy that supports students’ future clinical work while also helping them build healthier habits in their own lives. [there are others too – happy to chat if you’re curious]

When this stuff lands, it really lands. Students recognise it as relevant to their degree and their own lives.

Everyone Wants In (For Good Reasons)

But it isn’t just me and the wellbeing team. Every support service has developed curriculum-based content and could list successful curriculum-based initiatives like I did above.

And it makes sense. If you think about the knowledge and skillsets that these support services provide, they are all highly relevant:

• Student Learning Support: academic skills, critical thinking, essential for success.
• Careers: connecting learning to employability, building job-ready skillsets.
• International student services: supporting an expanding, diverse cohort with unique needs.
• Wellbeing teams: helping students build skills to manage stress, setbacks, and life more generally.

All valuable. All genuinely useful.

But collectively? I think a bottleneck is forming.

Topic coordinators and lecturers are now trying to weave core discipline content as well as support service content into a limited teaching space. Many welcome it, but it’s getting harder.

Why Students Aren’t Showing Up Elsewhere

Another driver is student capacity.

Students are explicitly telling us that their ability to engage with additional programs, workshops, or wellbeing activities outside their studies is limited. Work, caring responsibilities, health issues, commuting, life admin – it all adds up to a sense of overload and thus not using the services available to them, even if they would be helpful.

I saw this first with programs like the Be Well Plan:

• strong sign-ups, but
• low attendance, and
• students saying “too busy” (sometimes avoidance, sometimes just life)

Asynchronous content can help a bit (access it in their ‘own time’) but not as much as I once hoped.

So weaving support into curriculum became a leading option. But…

…Back to the Bottleneck

If wellbeing, careers, learning support, disability, international and others all want a presence inside topics, we risk turning a crisp, discipline-focused curriculum into something bloated.

And that leads to the question I’ve been circling during my break:

What If Support Services Acted as One?

All located in a cathedral style mega service!!

Could we create a unified curriculum approach?

Imagine:

• Each support service contributes its core starter content.
• Together, these form a lightweight, flexible support curriculum.
• Any topic could embed the bits that make sense.
• Each module points back to deeper resources for students who want more.
• Students get a sample of the actionable skills and knowledge on offer without being overloaded.
• Topic teams don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

This recognises the diversity in any classroom:

• Some students want more careers content.
• Some want more wellbeing skills.
• Some want academic strategies.
• Some want cultural support.
  (And many don’t know what they want until they see it.)

A shared approach forces us, as services, to clarify our core messages and to genuinely collaborate rather than gently competing for curriculum space.

And I don’t think this necessarily has to live (or only live) in the learning management system. Students on placement with me, developing content for our BetterU site, have mentioned repeatedly that they are spending significant amounts of time on platforms we aren’t on: reddit, Instagram, ChatGPT and more.

The important requirements are that as support services we are unified AND developing useful content that can get in front of students where they are spending their time AND we don’t disrupt the discipline specific content in the process.

The Zoom-Out Effect of Taking Leave

During normal work life, each support service focuses on its own mandate. Which absolutely makes sense.

Collaboration happens (e.g. cross-referrals), but curriculum work tends to run in separate lanes.

But when you take some time away from the system (i.e. during leave) it creates that helpful zoom-out effect. You start thinking about the system as a whole and not just your part in it.

The opportunities I get to connect with colleagues from other universities in Australia tells me that most universities (mine included) have amazing support staff doing great work.

But all of us are struggling to reach students – not due to student disinterest, but their available bandwidth. Students are juggling so many responsibilities (and grappling with the complex problems the world has that they are entering into), that they don’t have the time to sift through a complex support ecosystem. And they don’t want topics clogged with non-discipline content.

So, I think we as support services need to better work together.

No Easy Answers… Yet

In doing so, there are some genuinely complex questions to try and answer:

• Which topics get this shared support curriculum and how?
• How do we avoid repetition as students move through degrees?
• How do we coordinate services with limited resources and natural turf-protection?
• How do we make content that is both generic (broad appeal) but also personalised (individually helpful)?
• and many more………

I don’t have the answers (apologies if you read this far hoping that I did). But I do hope that during my time in higher ed we get to attempt a solution.

Because the potential upside is significant. Students leaving university not only with the skills and knowledge of their discipline, but also the skills and knowledge of supporting all aspects of their life beyond study (wellbeing, learning, acculturation, career).

For now, this is just a holiday thought – one of those ideas that lands when your brain finally has space to wander.

Apologies in advance to the colleague who receives the inevitable rambling email when I return 🙂