Inside Higher Ed, Resilience Skills Curriculum Gets Ahead of Student Crisis:
A resiliency skills program at Pepperdine University equips students with tools to address challenges in their lives and create a campus culture that values well-being.
The Resilience Informed Skills Education (RISE) program at Pepperdine University integrates education around resiliency in student life and provides learners with life skills to get ahead of crisis and mitigate distress.
The curriculum, developed by Connie Horton, vice president for student affairs, draws on research to provide six dimensions of resilience. Students first encounter RISE programming in their first term through a credit-based small group, but the program is woven throughout academics, residence life and social programming.
What’s the need: Horton started her career in higher education as a psychology faculty member researching mental health, eventually transitioning to leading Pepperdine’s counseling center and now, student affairs division. Throughout her career, mental health concerns for college students have grown exponentially nationally and at Pepperdine.
A spring 2019 survey of Pepperdine students found 65 percent had felt overwhelming anxiety, 55 percent had felt things were hopeless and 44 percent had felt “so depressed it was difficult to function” during the semester.
While the university had a fully equipped counseling center, crisis team and student affairs staff who could manage a crisis as it happened, Horton envisioned a program that could address student distress before it manifested in crisis.
“The idea was: let’s get upstream,” Horton explains. “Instead of just being intervention and crisis response, let’s get upstream and teach people skills, ways of thinking, ways of living that would help promote mental health.”
RISE had a soft launch in fall 2019 and a gradual rollout over remote instruction in 2020–21, with most programs starting in 2021 or 2022.
The curriculum: RISE curriculum has six dimensions of resilience: physical, social, cognitive, spiritual, service and life skills, each with three “building blocks” that contribute to the dimension.
Pepperdine, as a religious institution, encourages spiritual resilience in students by adopting a faith perspective, engaging in spiritual practices and participating in a faith community.
“We definitely wanted to use best practices, what does research show,” Horton says. “At a faith-based institution, we also wanted to feel like we could authentically integrate a faith perspective.”
