The COVID-19 epidemic in the early 2020s is making a big difference for educators around the world. For the past 2 years, the curriculum and working patterns have been overturned in response to this epidemic, which has brought unprecedented challenges and physical and mental stress to preschool teachers. This situation can have a drastic impact on the acquisition of job well-being for preschool teachers. During this special time, the leader’s management style will also influence the psychological feelings of the organization’s staff. For example, empowering leadership is an important management function that empowers subordinates, emphasizes the meaning of work, promotes participation in decision-making, and expresses confidence. Therefore, in the current COVID-19 pandemic context, it is worthwhile to explore the topic of empowering leadership to ensure preschool teachers’ well-being, by balancing work demands and work resources in a way that facilitates a sense of organizational support and reduces job stress, while relatively fewer studies have been conducted on the relationship between preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on this, this study proposed a research model from the theoretical perspective of the Job Demands-Resources Model to explore the influence of empowering leadership, sense of organizational support, and job stress on preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve the purpose of this study, a convenience sampling method was used to invite 500 preschool teachers in China to complete a questionnaire survey, and after removing invalid samples and data with incomplete answers, reliability and validity analyses and model fit tests were conducted, followed by a structural equation modeling method for path analysis. The results of the study showed that (1) in the kindergarten work context, empowering leadership showed a significant negative effect on job stress, but a significant positive effect on job well-being and a significant positive effect on sense of organizational support. (2) Sense of organizational support had a significant negative effect on job stress but a significant positive effect on preschool teachers’ job well-being. (3) Preschool teachers’ job stress and job well-being showed a significant negative effect. The contribution of this study was to explore the relationship between understanding leadership empowerment and preschool teachers’ job well-being in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic based on the Job Demands-Resources Model, which will facilitate educational organizational contexts to empower preschool teachers to work harder to reduce their job stress as well as enhance their sense of organizational support and promote the acquisition of job well-being.

The post-COVID-19 era means that the COVID-19 is basically under control; however, the risk of the pandemic still affects people's work, study, and life, physically and psychologically. In this era, due to the more challenges first-year college students face, more attention should be paid to their mental health. An emerging study demands-resources (SD-R) model can explain the influencing mechanism of college students' mental health. This model suggests that study demands increase the risk of student burnout, which results in mental health problems; meanwhile, study resources reduce student burnout and increase student engagement, thus improving mental health. Based on the SD-R model, this study explores the impacts of time pressure, emotional exhaustion, perceived social support, and student engagement on mental health and provides adequate measures to reduce the risk of mental health problems among first-year students. Time pressure, perceived social support, emotional exhaustion, student engagement, and mental health scales were used to investigate 537 first-year students at three universities in Guangxi, China, of whom 290 (54%) were female, and 247 (46%) were male, and the average age was 18.97 ± 1.01. Results indicated that: (1) Moderate scores on time pressure and emotional exhaustion and slightly-above-the-median scores on perceived social support, student engagement, and mental health were found among first-year students in the post-COVID-19 era. (2) Time pressure had a positive relationship with emotional exhaustion and a negative relationship with mental health. (3) Perceived social support was negatively correlated with emotional exhaustion but positively correlated with student engagement, and thus improved mental health. Results of this study with a sample of first-year college students in China support the hypotheses based on the SD-R model. These findings suggest that increasing perceived social support and student engagement while decreasing time pressure and emotional exhaustion may promote mental health among first-year college students.

The preschool education profession often faces many challenges and preschool teachers, as important members of the preschool education profession must respond to a variety of emergencies with young children, which also leads to high levels of job stress and can have a negative impact on their ongoing well-being. Past research has pointed out that a healthy lifestyle is one of the key factors in enhancing sustainable well-being in high-stress work situations and many studies have found that good leisure activity engagement as a healthy lifestyle is associated with higher levels of well-being. However, the relationship between preschool teachers’ leisure engagement and sustainable well-being has been less explored. Therefore, this study proposed seven research hypotheses based on the engagement theory proposed by Fredricks et al. (2004) and developed a research model to explore the relationship between three types of leisure engagement, including behavioral, affective and cognitive, and preschool teachers’ job stress and sustainable well-being, using age as a control variable. This study used a cross-sectional web-based questionnaire with a convenience sample of 500 preschool teachers in China. The collected data were analyzed for reliability and validity, model fit testing and structural equation modeling for model validation after removing invalid data and incomplete responses. The results of the study showed that (a) behavioral engagement was not related with either the job stress or sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; (b) Emotional and cognitive engagement were negatively related to job stress but positively related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; and (c) Job stress was negatively related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers; (d) Age is an effective control variable. From the above results, it is clear that not all three types of leisure engagement are effective in terms of reducing the work stress of preschool teachers. As well as being related to the sustainable well-being of preschool teachers emotional and cognitive engagement contributed more to sustainable well-being acquisition.

Teacher education students, as an important reserve in the field of education, their growth and development are related to the future of science, economy, sustainable development of education. Through participation in the educational practice of STEAM, which integrates science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics is more beneficial for them to acquire 21st century skills like communication, collaboration, learning innovation and critical thinking. However, little has been seen about the use and effectiveness of short videos in STEAM education activities and how they can be used to support and promote teacher education students STEAM learning performance and sustainable inquiry behaviors. Therefore, this study combines the framework of triadic reciprocity determinism theory and technology acceptance theory to propose six research hypotheses and develop a research model to explore the relationship between collaborative self-efficacy (CS-E), perceived usefulness (PU) of short videos, perceived ease of use (PEOU), STEAM learning performance and teacher education students’ sustainable inquiry behavior. To achieve the purpose of this study, this study used purposive sampling and invited teacher education students from five classes of preschool education at a university in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region (GZAR), China, to participate in this study. A total of 8 h of instructional guidance was provided over a four-week period, in which participants used short videos for collaborative group learning and independent inquiry and applied STEAM concepts to kindergarten science activities. Participants’ STEAM performance was measured and surveyed during the fourth week. The results of the study validation showed that (1) teacher education students CS-E had a positive effect on the PU and PEOU of short videos; (2) Teacher’s education students PEOU of short videos had a positive effect on usefulness; (3) Teacher’s education students PU and PEOU of short videos had a positive effect on STEAM learning performance; (4) Teacher’s education students’ STEAM learning performance had a positive effect on sustainable inquiry behavior.