ABSTRACT
Academia is a stressful environment for graduate students and faculty due to high expectations, comprehensive assignments, and diverse roles and responsibilities. Faculty report stressors related to high demands for scholarly productivity, teaching excellence, and administrative duties. These high expectations are often heightened by increasing class sizes, limited administrative support, decreased funding opportunities, and busy schedules. There are also increased pressures for racialized faculty groups. More recently, professors have also been facing an increasing number of COVID-19-related stressors, such as remote working, childcare obligations, research delays, secondary trauma, and mental exhaustion. Educational researchers suggest that in a context of an increasingly changing academia, mentoring and community-building have the potential to promote growth-fostering relationships while supporting individuals' sense of self-worth, self-esteem, and competency. Considering the importance of mentorships and wellbeing in graduate education, as well as artful practices for learning and teaching, the authors shares their perspectives of play-building as they continue to develop intercultural relationships through collaborative writing, storytelling, and understandings of the Creative Process, as well as two Indigenous pedagogical tools: the Medicine Wheel and the Two Row Wampum Belt. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)