Resilience Revisited
By Robin Sutherland-Harris
Resilience (or resiliency) is having a moment. It seems everywhere we turn, from infrastructure to ecology, community development to business, we are encouraged to adopt or encourage resilient behaviours—in ourselves, and in our relationships, communities, and workplaces. Higher education is no exception. Many universities, including, for example, Stanford with its Resilience Project, support the development of resilience in their students, often with a particular emphasis on the first year experience. Failure is reframed as a learning opportunity, obstacles are there to be overcome, and the importance of a growth mindset is front and centre.
Here at York, university-wide initiatives around experiential education provide students with rich opportunities to build resilience through the application of theory to concrete experience, and our First Year Commitment supports the development of many of the skills seen as key to resilience. There is immense value in helping students to develop their resilience—after all, the ability to persevere and bounce back in the face of hardship is a tremendous asset in today’s world.
But is this emphasis on resilience as benign as it seems at first glance? In this post, we will delve into some critiques of resilience thinking, explore some recent research into how and why resilience works best, and consider some of the implications for those who work, teach, and learn in higher education.
Before we continue, let’s take a moment to define our terms. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about resilience? Unsurprisingly, given the variety of disciplines and groups making use of the concept, resilience has many definitions. Some have characterised it as an inherent trait, others as a set of skills that can be developed over time; some see it as primarily relevant to individuals or groups responding to significant trauma, while to others it is a behaviour most people will engage in from time to time (Jacelon, 1997; Southwick et al., 2014).
A broad definition is supplied by the American Psychological Association (2014), which describes resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress.” This definition is a good match for the ways resilience is typically discussed in higher education, where it is often linked with well-being, optimism, and the ability to thrive.
However, resilience also has its critics. As with any term that has become a bit of a buzzword, resilience is often used in ways that can flatten and obscure its complexity. It can become simply synonymous with coping skills, or even deployed as a justification for government cuts that increase class sizes, as recently happened here in Ontario.
Beyond this, some criticize resilience thinking as a neo-liberal tool, one that places the burden of large-scale societal stresses on individuals and local communities (Mckeown & Glenn, 2018). As MacKinnon and Derickson (2014) write, “the resilience of capitalism is achieved at the expense of certain social groups and regions that bear the costs of periodic waves of adaptation and restructuring.” These critiques suggest that it is not enough to support (or insist upon) the development of the characteristic skills and behaviours of resilience when doing so offloads the responsibility of identifying and dealing with social problems from larger entities such as states, international agencies, and institutions.
This poses some challenges for our understanding of resilience within higher education! We want our students to be able to thrive in the face of adversity, but surely not at the cost of encouraging them to take on a disproportionate burden of systemic social issues as individuals. For example, if the prospect of attaining long-term, stable, rewarding jobs on graduation exhausts and demotivates students, is the problem really their lack of resilience?
So how can we approach resilience in a more nuanced way, informed by these critiques? There is another angle to resilience, emphasized in recent work by Dr. Michael Ungar at Dalhousie University’s Resilience Research Centre, among others. Here, resilience exists both within the individual, as mindset, skills, and behaviours, and also, crucially, in their immediate and broader contexts. Resilience is a characteristic that lives both within each person and within their environment (Ungar, 2012).
In this short video, Ungar explains resilience in the individual as “the capacity to navigate to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain our well-being, and to negotiate for these resources to be provided in ways that are meaningful to us” (emphasis in original). Furthermore, resilience cannot happen, regardless of the individual, if there are no resources to navigate to, or if these resources are excessively rigid and unadaptable.
For those of us engaged in supporting student resilience, the challenge is to ensure that we do more than offer our students opportunities to have the kinds of robust learning experiences that can build resilience individually. We need to commit not only to pointing the way to existing resources, but also to creating and enhancing resource-rich environments that are themselves resilient spaces responsive to student needs. This is true at the level of single class sessions, courses, programs, and across the university.
What can we each do to support not only resilient students but also resilient teaching and learning environments? To provide just one example, Vrinda Varia and Jordan Brooks discuss one approach to building this type of environmental resilience at the institutional level: they ensure programming is driven not by a reactionary response to specific incidents, but rather by learning outcomes that support student development and outreach and community building within and beyond the university.
On a much smaller scale, I am spurred to think carefully about the adaptability and negotiability of the teaching and learning frameworks in my own courses (including assignment deadlines, assessment structures, course materials, and outside resources). These are learning resources, so what am I doing to ensure that students can navigate to them and negotiate with them? Are my courses resilient environments in which students can practice and exercise resilience as individuals? It can be challenging, but this reframing of what it means to be resilient is also exciting and empowering!
References
Jacelon, C. S. (1997). The trait and process of resilience. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 25(1), 123–129.
MacKinnon, D., & Derickson, K. D. (2013). From resilience to resourcefulness: A critique of resilience policy and activism. Progress in Human Geography, 37(2), 253–270.
Mckeown, A., & Glenn, J. (2018). The rise of resilience after the financial crises: A case of neoliberalism rebooted? Review of International Studies, 44(2), 193–214.
Southwick, S. M., Bonanno, G. A., Masten, A. S., Panter-Brick, C., & Yehuda, R. (2014). Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: Interdisciplinary perspectives. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 5: 25338.
Ungar, M. (2012). Researching and theorizing resilience across cultures and contexts. Preventive Medicine, 55(5), 387–389.
About the Author
Robin is an experienced educator who, over the last 10 years, has taught undergraduate courses in the Humanities, mentored and led graduate students as TAs and peer-trainers, and provided faculty development and support across the disciplines. She is passionate about the development of pedagogical literacy and teaching and learning excellence in higher education, whether in an individual course or at the level of curricula and institution-wide programming. In her position as an Educational Developer with the Teaching Commons at York University, she is the liaison for the Humanities (LA&PS). Robin’s current research explores the many facets of the curriculum renewal process for faculty, staff, and educational developers.