Developing The Sustainable Happiness Semester Journal 

Sean O'Brien Murray 

The idea for the Sustainable Happiness Semester Journal was first formed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The isolation necessitated by the pandemic intensified a pre-existing mental health crisis among post-secondary students across Canada. I remember reports at the time describing the crisis as a “loneliness epidemic.”

We did not set out to write a journal, but rather to answer the question: How can we create a resource that supports the well-being of students and educators? This immediately led us to the challenge of format. How could we distill over 20 years of foundational work in education, sustainability, and well-being by my co-author, Dr. Catherine O’Brien, into an accessible resource that students and educators could use to better understand their relationships with themselves, others, and their environment? We felt that a self-reflective journal, with guiding questions related to sustainability, well-being, happiness, and education, could help students identify aspects of their well-being that might be strengthened.

Our next challenge was designing the journal as both a classroom resource and a tool for personal reflection. Given the themes of the journal, we wanted students to experience both the support that comes from group discussion and the intimacy of private journaling. To achieve this balance, we used the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals icons as indicators for which questions could be used as classroom discussion prompts.

A priority throughout the writing process was inclusivity. We constantly asked ourselves: What assumptions are these questions making? Do they assume the reader has full hearing capacity, or safe access to parks and nature? But we also knew we needed outside perspectives. Most importantly, when making a resource for students - What do students actually think about what we created? With the support of our advisory committee, and through a pilot study of the first edition of the journal at Dawson College, we are proud to publish a resource that is our best answer to the question my co-author and I asked each other in 2020: How can we support student and educator well-being?

We continue to keep the journal up to date as new research in the areas of Sustainability and Well-being emerges. In 2023, with the support of Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan), the Sustainable Happiness Semester Journal was released in French, available both as a printed edition and a digital license.

If you have questions about the journal or maybe ideas for the next edition, we'd love to hear from you! 

USING THE JOURNAL IN THE CLASSROOM