Reimagining Faculty Development: A Psychosocial Well-being Lens for Higher Education Institutions

Description

Page: 1114-1120

Shivani Mani and Abhijit Mishra (Department of Humanities and Social Science, Madan Mohan Malaviya University of Technology, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh)

Higher education faculty development has traditionally focused on improving teaching competencies, research productivity, and technical skills. While these are valuable, such a narrow focus tends to neglect the psychosocial dimensions of the well-being of faculty members, such as mental health, emotional strength, social relationships, and sense of belonging in the university. This paper critically examines existing faculty development models and advocates for a paradigm shift toward a holistic, psychosocial well-beingoriented model. Grounded in positive psychology, organisational behaviour, and higher education policy insights, the paper highlights how conventional faculty development strategies have been lacking in addressing burnout, loneliness, emotional labour, and role overload, problems that have escalated post-pandemic and with policy reforms such as India’s NEP 2020. It presents a substitute Psychosocial Faculty Development Model (PFDM) grounded on four interdependent pillars: Mental Health Support, Community and Collegial Culture, Emotional Intelligence Training, and Institutional Empathy and Care. This model emphasises faculty as whole people instead of just professionals and calls for institutional strategies that foster psychological safety, peer support networks, reflective dialogue, and participative leadership. Recommendations include integrating well-being elements into faculty induction, introducing peer mentoring, designing specific spaces for reflection, and providing ongoing emotional intelligence training. The paper concludes by offering an empirical policy proposal for higher education institutions, calling for the inclusion of psychosocial well-being in faculty development policies, structures, and practices. This offers a path to sustainable faculty well-being and enhanced institutional effectiveness within the evolving academic landscape.