The UPRIGHT project is aimed primarily at the adolescent population and aims to work on and increase their resilience.

UPRIGHT “Universal Preventive Resilience Intervention Globally implemented in schools to improve and promote mental Health for Teenagers” is a European project funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission that will end in 2021. Within the framework of the project, a universal school intervention has been implemented for three consecutive years aimed at the adolescent population and their closest circle (family, teachers and educational centre), with the aim of strengthening resilience and mental well-being, and empowering them in different skills to cope with difficulties. To this end, the intervention has two psycho-educational programmes: “Well-being for us”, which promotes individual resilience, and “Well-being for all”, which promotes collective resilience.

Since the beginning of the project, UPRIGHT has published several scientific articles and book chapters at international and national level. Recently, the book “Wellbeing and Resilience Education: COVID-19 and Its impact on Education” has been published [1]where the UPRIGHT project has a chapter entitled: “UPRIGHT – Education for Adolescent Wellbeing and Resilience – Disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic”. We put some questions to the project’s lead researcher and co-author of the chapter, Carlota las Hayas de Kronikgune, to find out more about UPRIGHT’s contribution to the book.

What is the aim of the book? What is the main theme of the book?

This book is about the theory and practice of wellbeing and resilience education and the immediate impact of COVID-19. Specifically, it explores the implications of the exceptional situation produced by COVID-19 on students, teachers and teaching from a transdisciplinary and international perspective.

The book includes thirteen chapters written by 27 scholars from around the world, providing recent research data from the fields of organisational psychology, general psychology, neuroscience, policy and education. The book addresses numerous topics, including appreciative enquiry, educational leadership, refugee education, education for resilience, online course design, teacher well-being, and community responses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Who is the book aimed at?

This book may be of interest to academics, teacher educators, postgraduate students, school leaders and policy makers researching the field of well-being, resilience, education, schools and schooling.

How does the theme of the book relate to UPRIGHT?

The book presents research on well-being and resilience in education and offers responses to crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. UPRIGHT is closely aligned with this theme as it is a project that seeks to improve and promote mental wellbeing and prevent mental disorders in adolescent students by increasing resilience. The psycho-educational programme developed works on resilience through four main components: coping, efficacy, social and emotional learning, and the practice of mindfulness.

In the past year, we have also had to work hard to adapt the project to the exceptional situation caused by COVID-19 and to make the implementation of the project more flexible in order to cope with the new needs. The specific chapter on UPRIGHT describes the consequences of the pandemic on the programme and the responses to the problems identified.

What kind of content is presented in the UPRIGHT chapter?

The project was created in response to the increase in mental health problems among adolescents. To this end, it develops a resilience programme carried out in educational centres that promotes mental wellbeing and prevents the development of mental disorders. The main objective is to support adolescent students by providing them with knowledge and tools to face the challenges of everyday life. At the start of the project in 2018, we did not anticipate that the competences and skills of the resilience programme would be so tested with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this chapter we have sought to answer the following questions: How can we enhance the well-being and resilience of adolescent learners, how can these methods be adapted to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis, and how can education in well-being and resilience be transferred and adapted to e-learning?

Information about the book can be found at the following link: https://www.routledge.com/Wellbeing-and-Resilience-Education-COVID-19-and-Its-Impact-on-Education/White-McCallum/p/book/9780367680961

(The content of the book is not open access or freely downloadable).

If you want to keep up to date with all the activities carried out by the project and other publications, visit their official website: www.uprightproject.eu or follow them at @Uprightproject1

[1] Reference: White, M. A., & McCallum, F. (Eds.). (2021). Wellbeing and Resilience Education: COVID-19 and Its Impact on Education. Routledge.