Reconsidering Resilience in Education

Book excerpt: This book explores the concept of resilience and its significance in responding to a rapid and ever-changing globalised world whilst critiquing its ‘buzzword’ status in contemporary times. Drawing on research from a range of educational settings, the book demonstrates that the resilience of individuals and their surrounding systems should not be viewed in isolation and that the interplay between individual resilience, community resilience and resilient societies is complex and symbiotic. On this basis, it illustrates that efforts to promote resilience would benefit from a systems approach capable of coping with this complexity. Using the ideas of agency and the power of self-determinism, a development of Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological model is presented to illustrate the complexity of their interplay. Existing models of resilience are developed with the book offering the Dynamic Interactive Model of Resilience (DIMoR) as a way to analyse and support resilience which moves beyond a reductionist, descriptive and ‘fashionable’ presentation of resilience.