Mindful museums: Developing mindfulness-based museum object-handling activities to improve the mental health of university students.

Project Summary (Please do not exceed 4000 characters, including spaces):

This innovative, interdisciplinary project will explore how museums can collaborate with university student wellbeing services to offer mindfulness-based museum object handling activities to improve the mental health of university students.

University students have reported yearly-increases in mental health concerns over the previous decade, driven by stressors both linked and distinct to the university experience and further exacerbated by the recent Covid-19 Pandemic and Cost-of-Living Crisis. Within this context, there have been urgent calls for university support services to expand and diversify their portfolio of wellbeing interventions for students with low-level mental health concerns.

Mindfulness-based museum object handling is an innovative intervention design which draws from, and seeks to interweave, two areas of research within museum studies and mindfulness studies. Within museum studies, there is a growing body of evidence which advocates for the effectiveness of museum object handling interventions in improving the health and wellbeing of varied at-risk populations, including individuals living with mental health conditions.

Recent scholarship has suggested that there is significant potential for these interventions in supporting the mental health and wellbeing of university students. Mindfulness-based approaches are increasingly being used to facilitate engagement with art in art gallery contexts. 'Slow looking' interventions have gained particular traction whereby visitors are invited to look at and contemplate an artwork for an extended period before sharing their thoughts with the group.

Slow looking activities have recently evidenced positive mood and increased aesthetic engagement outcomes within general populations in online contexts.

In interweaving these two areas, the project will be the first to explore the mental health and wellbeing outcomes of mindfulness-based approaches to museum object handling, with a focus on student populations. The project will bring together museum studies, mindfulness studies, and studies in psychological health to develop a mindfulness and museum-object led methodological innovation targeted at improving university student wellbeing and supporting student wellbeing service provision.

The interventions will be designed by the student lead during the project and will be evaluated using a quasi-experimental research design measuring wellbeing outcomes through mixed methods and pre-post measures. Post-session qualitative semi-structured interviews will be employed to gain an in-depth understanding of student experiences with the objects and mindfulness practices, and will be complemented by observation notes.

Quantitative outcomes will be gathered through stress, anxiety and mindfulness self-report questionnaires. It is anticipated that the intervention will be explored through a study consisting over two phases: 1.) an 8-week pilot programme with 8 participants (n=8) and 2.) 6x8 week programmes with 8 participants (n=48).

The project is planned as a collaboration with Leicester Arts and Museum service and University Hospitals of Leicester who will provide spaces and handling collections, and the University of Leicester and DeMontfort University whose student wellbeing services will invite and pre-screen participants exhibiting low-lying mental health concerns.

The study will build towards and overarching programme theory and a handbook which will be disseminated among relevant stakeholders so that the approach can be replicated in other settings. It will further provide a model for working partnerships between museums and university support services.