I'm not sure of 'teaching' resilience but i am interested in exploring it. As you imply by your word 'ecologies', resilience is learned (or not) from the totality of experiences encountered by people. You have limited your rerquerst to people with obvious disabilities or marginalised but I think it applies across the board to any person who is more limited socially, physically, intellectually or emotionally than others. As a teacher, my experience and interest is restricted to resilience in the school setting, and the students I have most experience with are those with social, ie family or socioeconomc background, limitations.

With all that, I can say that students who begin school with any form of limitation beit low socio-economic or poor family background, the ecology of schooling reduces resilience, at leaast in that context. What I mean by that is that students who have clearly poor resilience at school, can still have reasonable resilience in other contexts eg sport. From this observation, and my readings in psychology, I can conclude that resilience is built up over a long time by a person linking reasonable success with reasonable effort. Note that the definitions of 'success' and 'reasonable' are in the eyes of the beholder. The person themselves must recognise whether they are successful or not and whether tthey have put in reasonble effort or not. Most commonly, too much failure with reasonable effort results in eventual loss of resilience and usually a tendency to avoid situations where the failure is most likely.

Success with too little effort, breeds a different lack of resilience, Students of this type, are OK while success is easy but are inclined to give up with any failure, so they truly have no resilience. So it is a bit like the goldilocks principle, effort and success must be well matched, or 'just right' for resilience to be developed. There are of course other factors listed in the literature, such as appropriate forms of feedback.

... more later...

So! I tnk resilience is learned but can't be taught, except by the manipulation of the person's social ecology. It is mostly developed in context, ie resilience is specific to each situation for each person, and it appears tht it is rare that a person has poor resilience in every context of their lives. With respect to your origiinal question: to build resilience, you ave to manipulate the conditions of the context you want to work on so that the person recognises that they have some success, commensurate with their effort. It doesnot seem to be necessary to isolate all people so that they cannot compare themselves to others. As a student of mine once said 'I don't care that I'm not as good as the others, as long as I am improving.' This to me says it all. Each person has to recognise that they are gaining something for them wit their efforts.

My pet hate is school assessment and reporting which I believe is fundamentally designed to reduce resilience in many/most students. The A - E system 'appears' to say to poorer performing students that they can't improve despite their efforts. Eventually they opt out of the system, and in many cases show their innate personal resilience by clever oppositional strategies in school settings. Many people have written in other questions that their students try hard regardless. My inference from the context of the respondent is that these were students in asian countries. It is possible that needs outweigh the demoralising impact of the system because education is so important to later survival. Take that imperatiove away, as in Australia, England and the USA, and lower performing students opt out of education to avoid competition. A sign of poor resilience in the context.

The answer in general sense is to construct the whole system to reduce competition and focus on personal improvement. Make personal gains more obvious to each person and rain mentors/tutors/teachers to speak about improvement in non competitive terms, focussing on the gain with respect to the effort put in. Social context plays an important role as I implied, but tis is nearly impossible to manipulate, tough we should try.

In essence, we want people to say to themselves, 'I put in a good effort to do a good job.'

Agreeably, manipulating the environment is one way to create a platform that develops resiliency. Additionally, it is necessary... But how do we intentionally develop resiliency in disenfranchised groups in order to address hegemony and intersectional barriers? Creating space for relationship, but what are other ways of knowing that develop various intelligences that would enhance resiliency? Sports, arts, focus groups?

If it can not be taught, good role models, good examples can help inspire students of disenfranchised groups.

While it was not perfect, the history of the Maori peoples in New Zealand after colonisation seems to have led to better outcomes than colonisation of other first nation people. Perhaps there is something to learn there for larger scale strategies.

On the smaller scale, my interest, every person is a mixture of many levels of resilience. A person can be completely non-resilient in one context (eg school or even one subject in school), yet be very resilient in other aspects of their lives. If the difference is great they will naturally focus on their strengths. For me, I want to help each person understand their make-up so they can understand why thy make certain choices of actions an make better decisions in the future. This may involve helping them understand issues of power and disenfranchisement as it affects them.

With respect to the conditions for developing resilience, removal of competition is mostly a good thing. My observations suggest the amongst younger people, competition is counterproductive, EXCEPT for those who already have good resilience. Better to focus on intrinsic rewards. 'Did you do a good job?' 'You must have put a good effort into that to get that result!' Etc

One could think of disenfranchisement as part of the ecology of people at a macro scale, leading to risk of poor resilience in areas of negative stereotype for those people. Also, increasing understanding of the impact of power, may become part of the ecology of those people to allow them to understand and overcome the effect of disenfranchisement

My opinion-if you regard teaching as creating the best conditions for learning, then it can be taught. The only way I can see to teach it is what I said earlier, but to follow up on what steve said as well. Students need to be made aware of issues of self talk, redefining terms such as success, failure and effort, understanding the effect of unbalanced power and disenfranchisement. In essence a blend of CBT and cultural studies. But if we have some control over the context in which we want to improve efficacy, then we need to do what we can to create conditions conducive to positive conceptions, such as creating the conditions wjere the definition of success and failure that we want them to understand are explicit.

that being said, people bring their existing worldview to bear on every new experience so the success of any strategy is always going to be mixed, and more often than not improvement is not obvious, for a while, and sometime s for several years, and occasionally never.

Heather, rereading your response to my first posts raises a couple of issues for me.

Can one develop resilience in groups? I think of resilience as a personal attribute. Perhaps the best way to think of what you are asking is what can be done to maximise resilience in individuals within a specific disenfranchised group? In that case my response would be to

1. 'Teach' the group specific knowledges about their group identity that encourages self worth. What is it that makes them special and valuable as a defined group?

2. Promote these group attributes to the outside society. This is best done by the group eg in group driven media experiments, similar to indigenous radia and TV stations in Australia?

3. Involving members of the group in taking control, seems to be a necessary facet.

Thank you everyone... As I've been reading Ungar's work, APA's Road to Resilience, others I think we can develop resiliency within a educational setting. Agreeably 1, 2, and 3 must be developed... but we must also develop a 4th attribute... the self, promote self-identity within the construction of the group. This would focus on what the individual has to bring to the group, similarly also should focus on addressing issues that may prevent resilience within the individual. It might be developed through mentorship. Intentional mentorship has had much success in helping at-risk youth succeed.

Is that too much to ask a teacher? Is it possible to do in the school system with prescribed curriculums? I feel like we must absolutely do it, otherwise we will be failing to change and address the issues in society as education is rather a microcosm of society. It's a challenge though in that most teachers are not ready to work with underrepresented populations. The underrepresented population I work with are Deaf people and people with disabilities. Depending on the situation, some individuals in light of all odds rise above the status quo and are resilient. We must develop resiliency in youth, if we seek to change/address issues within society.

To answer your question Mr. Gould I believe resiliency is cultivated on an individual level and a group level. So yes we can teach it in groups... Then what is the right size of the group? 2-5, 5-7, 7-12? I think group size would have to depend on the cultural mores and functional logistics. As for Deaf people, it is generally good to have 12 (MAX 15) or less in a group for visual access and fair classroom involvement. For people with disabilities like autism and others, it would depend on their disability, some maybe would have groups as small as 2-3 for ideal results.

I agree that resilience can be taught at both the individual and group level, but the success of one or the other is contingent upon the culture in which the person was raised.

If the disenfranchised group grew up in China, for example, with a collectivist perspective feeding their self-concept, they would appear to benefit from resilience education in groups, whereas those in the US would appear to do better individually.

Given that idea, the group size would vary depending on the cultural background, with individualist societies preferring smaller groups to the larger groups preferred by those within a collectivist society.

Still, the resilience itself comes from within the person because it would seem best to view the idea of resilience as a quality that manifests in and of itself, by itself, within the individual.

And the best way to teach this is by demonstrating the incentive to overcome adversity, with both exposure to the adversity AND the incentive. If the incentive is always or often experienced at the group-level, I feel that individualist-society individuals would suffer more than those in the collectivist society.

Wouldn't this lead to needing to seek affirmation to validate their acts and thoughts of resilience? Wouldn't that then be counter-intuitive?

I agree with your thoughts on group size corresponding to the individual's particular handicap (e.g. social inhibitions in individuals with Asberger's prohibit the group size beyond a small number, so it must be a small group).

I believe another area to consider is whether an individual grew up with siblings (or a close-knit, live at home family), and what kind of social and cultural significance the "order" in which they are born in relationship to these other family members plays into their self-concept (and thus, their ability to be resilient or learn resilience).

Why does this matter? Birth order may be a predicative factor in how these individuals relate to the social structure at home, and can translate to how they may relate to the social structure outside of it.

Let's join the idea of marginalized groups within this construction.

Consider the youngest-born (and deaf) individual in a family. Let us say the family is attuned to the specialized needs of this individual, who also must function socially with brothers and sisters in the act of sharing toys, sharing chores, etc.

Therefore, the individual is likely to have a proclivity to assume a stronger sense of self in the larger social fabric and carry a more resilient character. He or she would also appear to absorb resilience-education quicker and easier since the concept is familiar.

Good luck on your research, Heather!

Heather, here are two "case studies" from my life :) that might shed some light into the question: My answer is YES to your question. However, teaching soft skills like this is NOT done through LECTURES, but, NON-LECTURE activities, or events. I will give you two case studies:

CASE STUDY 1: Two of my kids went to Catholic schools. Please anyone, do not see this as an endorsement of any religious belief. I don't even practice this faith. This is strictly a case study.

As part of their education, they were forced to help homeless people in a homeless shelter, cook for them, do the dishes, and talk to them, understand their life. This was a COURSE. I believe that, as part of this practice, two of my kids were TAUGHT skills that can never be taught through lectures. They WERE TAUGHT RESPECT.

CASE STUDY 2: I grew up in Turkey. I went to a school that was considered one of the top schools in Turkey (ISTANBUL TECH UNIV - ITU). Our education system was ridiculous in that, they were pushing us to the breaking limit, with 8 courses every semester. STAYING ALIVE was a priority in many weeks, not LEARNING ! Our "competitor" university (another top-ranked one), which was following a very different educational system was only requiring students to take 4 courses. Before I came to the US, I interviewed at a few firms, and in the interviews, this was the general consensus: We get applicants from Istanbul Tech and the other univ. all day long, and they are both well educated. But, boy, Istanbul Tech people are very resilient, they must TEACH RESILIENCE there. This is what we need in the industry.

I will let you interpret the case studies.

Steve, I agree with your semantics more. Resilience is "developed" . Unfortunately, you have to push people close to their limit to develop it. The bad news is that, you have to really adjust the "limit" very well to prevent a total crash.

My readings on resilience is that it is contextualised. People can be resilient in academic settings but not in social situations, and every other variation you can think of. So when you say 'develop resilience' you need to be aware of the context you are interested in. To respond to you specifically Steve, i do think it is possible to do a better job of developing academic resilience, but it would take a minor overhaul of the system. The first case study put forward by Tolga develops resilience in that context and some students generalise it to a broader social context (and some don't). Schools won't be good at developing this aspect of resilience.

I have been reading and thinking more about this issues. When we say that a marginalised group is lacking resilience is this true. Steve is working in the area of resistance. What we think of as lacking reilience MAY be active resistence. Resilience implies a certainty of orientation towards the common goal. If the goal is not considered worthy of resilience, it can be actively discarded, ie resistence. In which case working on resilience may be unproductive, unless it included a change of paradigm to help the students value the goal (of success in particular subjects at school).

I absolutely agree that resilience can't be taught (depending on the meaning of taught) but can be developed through creation of appropriate environmental (social environment) factors. I guess the point I am making is that resilience ONLY has meaning when a goal is of interest to the student. In this sense your 'cost benefit analysis' is appropriate. I think your work is on the money in this aspect. Teachers attribute lack of resilience (often said with some disdain) to students who give up and opt out, but it may simply be that the goal as perceived by the student is meaningless to them. My approach, which has had some success, is to make the activity itself the goal, not some socially and temporally distant gol like a diploma or go to uni.  Speaking of lazy, I am not sure of the truth of that attribution either. Again, laziness could simply be lack of interest in the goal. Laziness is a kind of resistence and could be a logical decision by the student from their perspective. We should'nt attribute negative attitudes too readily. I prefer to simply accept the behaviour in a neutral sense and figure out how to work around it (such as changing paradigms and making the activity the goal).

Resilience can be thought but it is a long process and many obstacles need to be overcome to give you training:

though difficult to be carried out, yet still, i go with yes.

What are the research and hypothesis questions?

Please, this article maybe useful for you:

Chapter Promoting Resilience in Deaf Adolescents