The everyday ways that school ecologies facilitate resilience: Implications for school psychologists

Abstract

From a socio-ecological perspective of resilience, social ecologies are crucial to children’s functional outcomes in the face of adversity. Schools, in particular, are integral to the multiple social systems that children are embedded in. Consequently schools have a special responsibility towards meaningfully and routinely supporting children’s resilience. Drawing on a synthesis of 33 publications, I document the everyday ways that school ecologies enact this responsibility. I caution that although much of this everyday routine is potentially protective, it neglects important leverage points for supporting resilience. These include championing resilience in contextually-sensitive ways, pre-empting risk and advocating for systemic change, and being mindful of the costs of resilience. To optimize these leverage points, school psychologists need child-informed understandings of how school ecologies facilitate resilience differentially. They also need to adopt an activist stance that animates social change. The resilience-themed edition of School Psychology International, which this article introduces, develops this agenda.

Keywords

contextualized accounts resilience processes resilience-themed edition school ecology socio-ecological synthesis

Resilience, or positive adaptation to acute/chronic adversity, is a process that is complex and dynamic (Panter-Brick, 2015). In the face of risk that predicts negative outcomes, resilience promotes functional outcomes, such as physical and mental health, a sense of well-being, academic progress, and civic engagement (Masten, 2014a). Admittedly, the definition of what a functional outcome might be is relative to the socio-cultural life-world, historical time, and developmental stage of the child (Bottrell, 2009; Panter-Brick, 2015). This aggravates the complexity of understanding, and supporting, resilience.

Multiple models and theories explain the dynamic process of positive adjustment to adversity (see Masten, Cutuli, Herbers, & Reed, 2009). This themed edition adopts the Social Ecology of Resilience Theory (SERT) as theoretical framework. Similar to Cicchetti (2013), Masten (2001, 2014a, 2014b), and Rutter (1987), SERT conceptualizes resilience as a bi-directional process in which a social-ecology and child collaborate constructively (Ungar, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015). Such cooperation requires children to utilize whatever resources/supports are necessary to achieve functional outcomes, and to ask for the provision of such resources/supports should they be inaccessible or unavailable. It also demands that social ecologies initiate meaningful resource-provision, reciprocate in contextually-relevant ways when children negotiate for supports, and advocate for life-worlds that prioritize children’s well-being. Understood in this way, resilience cannot be reduced to a purely psychological mechanism, or to one for which children are primarily accountable (Masten, 2014a; Ungar, 2013, 2015). Instead, a social ecological understanding tasks social systems––including schools––with the responsibility of actively co-enabling resilience processes.

School is central to many children’s lives. In developing contexts, 90% of girls and boys attend primary school (Beattie, Brown, & Cass, 2015). In more developed countries (i.e. those that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD), rates of children’s participation in compulsory primary schooling exceed 90%. With the exception of China, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, the same is true of OECD-partner countries (OECD, 2014). Students attending primary and lower secondary education institutions in OECD-member countries spend an average of 7457 hours engaged in school-based education. When the hours spent in extra-mural activity are added, many children spend an even more significant proportion of their time at school. Given this prominence in children’s lives, school ecologies bear a special responsibility towards facilitating resilience processes (Condly, 2006; Masten, 2014b).

The extant resilience literature underscores that the school ecology – comprising multiple school-related facets including pedagogical, extra-mural, relational, service-related, and physical/spatial aspects – is fundamental to why and how some children adjust well to adversity (e.g. Condly, 2006; Doll, 2013; Henderson, 2012; Mallin, Walker, & Levin, 2013; Masten, 2014b; Rutter, 1987; Ungar, Russell, & Connelly, 2014; Werner & Smith, 1982). Ideally, school ecologies should support resilience in collaboration with other social ecological structures, including children’s communities and families (Esquivel, Doll, & Oades-Sese, 2011). However, when children come from communities and families that put them at risk, then the value of school-based support escalates exponentially (Song, Doll, & Marth, 2013). School-facilitated support of resilience is both formal (e.g. via prevention initiatives, interventions, resilience-focused projects, or health-promoting school approaches) and informal (e.g. via constructive teacher-student relationships or a warmly inclusive school climate). Importantly, Doll, Jones, Osborn, Dooley, and Turner (2011) report that ‘infusing these supports into children’s daily school routines increases the likelihood that children will thrive’ (p. 652).

Accounts of how school ecologies regularly support resilience occasionally include the contributions of school psychologists (SPs). For example, some Australian children from disadvantaged contexts referred to school-based counselling services as helpfully supporting how they coped with ‘tough lives’ (Howard & Johnson, 2000, p. 331). So too did some African American participants attending a public charter high school which was committed to optimizing the potential of young people, from low-income urban contexts, with histories of poor school attendance and/or behavioural problems, and/or juvenile justice records (see Mulloy, 2011). They reported that their school-based counsellors provided emotional support and strategic advice, mediated difficult peer relationships, and enabled resilience-supporting skills.

Notwithstanding such examples, the fact that SPs are only occasionally included in accounts of resilience raises questions. Does this reflect SPs’ preoccupation with psycho-educational assessments and educational matters (see Atkinson, Squires, Bragg, Muscutt, & Wasilewski, 2014), and does such preoccupation obstruct facilitation of resilience processes? Or, does it relate to the reality of SPs being inaccessible to many students, more particularly those in low-resource contexts (Jimerson, Stewart, Skokut, Cardenas, & Malone, 2009)? For example, Theron and Theron (2014) drew on the life-stories of 16 university students to conclude that SPs are not likely to contribute to the resilience processes of young people from disadvantaged South African communities because SPs are absent from these communities. Still, even though SPs are infrequently explicitly associated with how schools facilitate resilience, they and other school-based service-providers are well-placed to animate informed, school-embedded resilience processes (Masten, 2014b; Masten, Herbers, Cutuli, & Lafavor, 2008). Indeed, they have a great responsibility to do so (Noltemeyer & Bush, 2013), albeit cautiously (Doll et al., 2011).

Caution is a prerequisite, given the contextual and cultural relativity of resilience processes, and how this relativity, inter alia, informs children’s differential susceptibility and adaptability to risk (Wright, Masten, & Narayan, 2013). Put differently, SPs and school ecologies need to account for such relativity: Their support of resilience will likely vary, depending on the risks children are exposed to, as well as their gender, ethnicity, cultural beliefs, developmental stage, historical and social situatedness, and other variables (see, for example, Benard, 2004; Doll et al., 2011; Ecclestone & Lewis, 2013; Rutter, 2013; Theron & Theron, 2014; Tol, Song, & Jordans, 2013; Ungar et al., 2014). Thus, to champion resilience, SPs need to support resilience in ways that are relevant for, and meaningful to, individual children and/or a school’s student population (Masten et al., 2008). A starting point for such cautious facilitation is perusal of the ways in which school ecologies infuse resilience supports ‘into children’s daily school routines’ (Doll et al., 2011, p. 652), followed by an interrogation of their applicability to the school ecology in which SPs serve.

To this end, I use this article––which provides the groundwork for the subsequent articles included in this resilience-focused themed edition––to synthesize knowledge relating to how schools routinely facilitate resilience. I then comment critically on the usefulness of this evidence to SPs and school ecologies wishing to meaningfully champion resilience. Finally, I introduce how the remaining articles in this themed edition begin to address the limitations implicit in current understandings of school ecologies’ everyday support of resilience.

Method

To address the above aims, I conducted a purposeful search of the resilience literature (2000–2015)¹ for publications that document how school ecologies inform the resilience processes of children. To this end, I retrieved studies from the following electronic databases: Academic Search Premier, CINAHL, ERIC, MEDLINE, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, SocINDEX, and Teacher Reference Centre. Given the vast interest in resilience and the subsequent volume of resilience-focused publications (Masten, 2014b), I set strict delimiters on the search. I searched for publications that included the words resilience (or resiliency, resilient) and school (or schooling/school-based, classroom/teacher, academic/education(al)/learning environment, student/learner) in publication titles. This yielded 1562 results.

Given the number of apparently relevant publications, I excluded dissertations/theses, conference papers, reports, grey literature, all non-English publications, and duplications. I also excluded all publications that documented assessments, interventions, projects, or other formal programs to support resilience. My rationale for this exclusion was partly related to it being unclear to what extent such formal initiatives lead to sustained, or everyday, school-based support for resilience (Weare & Nind, 2011). My rationale also related to the extensive availability of systematic reviews/syntheses of formal school-based initiatives aimed at supporting children to be well-adjusted (e.g. Barry, Clarke, Jenkins, & Patel, 2013; Fazel, Hoagwood, Stephan, & Ford, 2014; Fazel, Patel, Thomas, & Tol, 2014; Hart & Heaver, 2012; Neil & Christensen, 2007; Stewart & Wang, 2012; Taub & Pearrow, 2013; Ungar et al., 2014; Waters, 2011; Weare & Nind, 2011; Zenner, Herrnleben-Kurz, & Walach, 2014).

Next, I perused the abstracts of journal articles/book chapters and further excluded those that (i) reported on the resilience of school-aged children without detailing how school ecologies regularly informed this resilience (e.g. Kim & Im, 2014); (ii) narrowly conceptualized or measured resilience as a specific outcome/domain (e.g. body image resilience––see Choate, 2007; language and literacy resilience––see Maier, Vitiello, & Greenfield, 2012); and/or (iii) had an advocacy focus, such as arguing for adopting a resilience/strengths/positive psychology perspective at school-level or recommending how schools could/should foster resilience (e.g. Condly, 2006; Downey, 2008; Richardson, 2008).

I am aware that the above strict delimiters could mean that I excluded publications that might have added valuable information. Likewise, I am cognisant that my narrow focus supports an idealized account of school ecologies that discounts how some school ecologies introduce and/or compound risks to children.² Nevertheless, this stringency facilitated a manageable set of 33 publications that conceptualized resilience as a process to which everyday school-based factors and systems contribute. This set includes 11 literature reviews and 22 empirical studies (the majority of which report North American studies––see Table 1, Supplemental Material). With the exception of Masten (2014b) and Motti-Stefanidi and Masten (2013), the included literature reviews do not draw on publications included in Table 1. In the aforementioned, duplication was limited to prior publications by the authors, Henderson (2012), and Theron and Engelbrecht (2012).

I limited data extraction to a focus on results that explained how any aspect/s of school ecologies support/s resilience. I listed all relevant results and then analysed this list thematically. This meant that I grouped similar findings and provided them with labels that paraphrased the over-arching contents (e.g. I grouped all results about warm, respectful, caring teacher-student relationships supporting resilience and labelled this set ‘warm, respectful teacher-student connections’). I then categorized labels that had similar foci (e.g. those that related to teacher actions or those that related to school-level initiatives) into broad themes that explained how school ecologies support resilience.

Findings: School ecologies everyday support of children’s resilience

Across continents, school ecologies support children to adjust constructively to a range of challenges (e.g. displacement, learning difficulty, marginalization, and/or socio-economic disadvantage) as part of their everyday business. Most typically, this is facilitated by teachers who actively champion resilience and protective whole-school systems.

Teachers champion resilience

The seminal resilience work of Werner and Smith (1982) drew attention to the salience of teachers as socio-ecological partners in Hawaiian children’s resilience processes. The role of teachers in facilitating resilience has continued to enjoy researcher attention to the extent that Ungar et al. (2014) reported that teacher-student relationships constitute ‘the most oft-studied factor’ (p. 69). In particular, the extant literature highlights that teachers champion resilience by enacting four core processes:³

Developing warm, respectful connections, including between teachers and students (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014; Bondy, Ross, Gallingane, & Hambacher, 2007; Cefai, 2007; Dass-Brailsford, 2005; Doll, 2013; Henderson, 2012; Höjer & Johansson, 2013; Howard & Johnson, 2000; Johnson, 2008; Johnson & Lazarus, 2008; Malindi & Machenjedze, 2012; Masten, 2014b; Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2013; Mulloy, 2011; Nolan, Taket, & Stagnitti, 2014; Reis, Colbert, & Hébert, 2005; Sharkey, You, & Schnoebelen, 2008; Song et al., 2013; Theron & Engelbrecht, 2012; Theron, Liebenberg, & Malindi, 2014; Theron & Theron, 2014), between peers (Antia, Reed, & Shaw, 2011; Bondy et al., 2007; Cefai, 2007; Nolan et al., 2014; Song et al., 2013), and between teachers and students’ families (Nolan et al., 2014; Song et al., 2013; Theron & Theron, 2014).

Communicating and enabling achievable, consistent expectations for respectful classroom interaction and student success/competence (Bondy et al., 2007; Cefai, 2007; Doll, 2013; Henderson, 2012; Höjer & Johansson, 2013; Jindal-Snape et al., 2013; Masten, 2014b; Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2009; Nolan et al., 2014; Samel, Sondergeld, Fischer, & Patterson, 2011; Sharkey et al., 2008; Swanson & Spencer, 2012; Theron et al., 2014; Theron & Theron, 2014).

Engaging and developing students as active, capable agents and facilitating mastery (Cefai, 2007; Doll, 2013; Henderson, 2012; Masten, 2014b; Masten et al., 2008; Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2009; Nolan et al., 2014; Song et al., 2013; Swanson & Spencer, 2012; Theron et al., 2014).

Investing in effective teaching, safe learning environments, and resilience-supporting classroom practices, and/or helping students to master classroom-based tasks (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014; Antia et al., 2011; Cefai, 2007; Dass-Brailsford, 2005; Doll, 2013; Harðardóttir, Júlíusdóttir, & Guðmundsson, 2015; Howard & Johnson, 2000; Johnson, 2008; Masten, 2014b; Nolan et al., 2014; Samel et al., 2011; Song et al., 2013; Swanson & Spencer, 2012; Theron & Theron, 2014).

With the exception of the review by Masten (2014b) and the studies by Acevedo and Hernandez-Wolfe (2014), Johnson (2008), Theron and Engelbrecht (2012), Theron et al. (2014), and Theron and Theron (2014), the extant literature makes infrequent mention of teachers facilitating resilience by intervening to limit/prevent risk to students. The same applies to teachers communicating/acting in culturally and/or contextually responsive ways (for exceptions see Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014; Bondy et al., 2007; Swanson & Spencer, 2012; Theron & Theron, 2014).

Everyday whole-school support of resilience

It is possible that individual teachers can champion resilience in the absence of whole-school support of resilience, but if a school community as a whole is committed to supporting resilience it means that the organizational way-of-being and ways-of-doing reinforces teacher championship of resilience. Whole-school support of resilience could, therefore, duplicate the above teacher-facilitated actions, but also extends them in that it is an organized strategy that applies to and is enacted by a school community as a whole. Daily whole-school support of resilience includes:

A school climate that promotes student success and facilitates school engagement. Access to safe, supportive adult and peer relationships, consistent rules and boundaries, opportunities for and expectations of success, and an ethos of trust, respect and caring inform this climate (Gilligan, 2000; Henderson, 2012; Höjer & Johansson, 2013; Malindi & Machenjedze, 2012; Mampane & Bouwer, 2011; Masten, 2014b; Masten et al., 2008; Mulloy, 2011; Reis et al., 2005). Constructive school climates promote a culture of connectedness and a shared identity amongst all those affiliated with the school. Such climates endorse values that promote academic and personal development, and enable an inclusive sense of community that, amongst others, embraces cultural minorities in culturally competent and welcoming ways (Swanson & Spencer, 2012; Ungar & Liebenberg, 2013). This includes respecting and facilitating diverse students’ needs for agency and competence, and providing relevant and meaningful curricula (Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2013). In particular, such climates are invaluable to the resilience of immigrant students and other marginalised groups and facilitate school engagement (Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2013; Ungar & Liebenberg, 2013).

A school system that addresses children’s basic needs. School facilitation of children’s basic needs for sustenance, health, and safety is particularly important when children come from homes and neighbourhoods that neglect provision, for whatever reason, of resources that are fundamental to survival. This could be done via, for example school health programs or feeding schemes (Höjer & Johansson, 2013; Masten, 2014b; Masten et al., 2008; Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2009), or referrals to community-based clinics (Malindi & Machenjedze, 2012).

Creative learning environments. Creative learning environments include stimulating physical aspects (e.g. flexible use of space; opportunity to work outdoors), motivating pedagogical approaches (e.g. playful/games-based approaches; collaborative peer work), and inspiring school-community partnerships (e.g. inviting input from dancers, artists, sculptors, actors, environmental workers, writers in learning/school activities) (Jindal-Snape et al., 2013). These in turn galvanize perseverance, mastery, sustained task-engagement, problem-solving, emotional development, and constructive interpersonal relationships/social skills––all of which inform resilience (Jindal-Snape et al., 2013; Mulloy, 2011). Green school contexts, in particular, are beginning to garner attention for the ways in which they support creative learning environments. For example, an American study by Chawla, Keena, Pevec, and Stanley (2014) reported how green schoolyards facilitated opportunities for primary and high school students to be reflective, agentic, focussed, and constructively social, and how this in turn nurtured positive adaptation to stress and hardship.

Extra-mural activities. Non-academic school-based or school-facilitated activity, such as sport, cultural events, music, and/or peer-tutoring and other similar service to others, facilitates resilience by affording children opportunity to make constructive connections, develop skills, and potentially experience mastery (Antia et al., 2011; Gilligan, 2000; Jones & Lafreniere, 2014; Masten, 2014b; Mulloy, 2011; Reis et al., 2005; Samel et al., 2011). Similarly, school-facilitated after-school programs (e.g. holiday clubs or enrichment activities over weekends) support resilience processes by, for example, helping young people to connect with pro-social peers, use their time constructively, and be less exposed to neighbourhood risk (Masten, 2014b; Mulloy, 2011; Theron & Theron, 2014).

Curricula that support optimal development. Curriculum content supports resilience when it capacitates children to develop the skills and knowledge needed for them to function well (Henderson, 2012; Masten, 2014b; Motti-Stefanidi & Masten, 2013). Such skills include life-skills (Mampane & Bouwer, 2011), but also basic literacy and numeracy skills (Malindi & Machenjedze, 2012).

Limitations implicit in the synthesized findings: Implications for school psychologists

The above account of the everyday ways in which school ecologies support the resilience processes of children shows that school ecologies leverage resilience in multiple ways. SPs, in turn, can and should advocate for, enable, and sustain meaningful use of this knowledge, provided that it is relevant to their school ecology and the children they serve. As part of this cautious approach, SPs need to consider three caveats implicit in this knowledge-base and how such awareness could promote additional ways to champion resilience.

Eclipsed pathways of resilience

A danger inherent in the evidence base of how schools informally promote resilience lies in the reiteration of supports across study contexts (e.g. warm, respectful teacher-student relationships or a supportive school climate). Reoccurrence could fuel assumptions of such supports being universally effective and so encourage homogenous approaches to school-based support of resilience that do not align well enough with the details of children’s contextualized lives. Whereas some adaptive systems and processes are universally supportive of resilience (e.g. constructive relational connections), the exact details characterizing these systems/processes are likely to vary (Masten, 2014b). The details are crucial to optimal facilitation of resilience (Panter-Brick, 2015). Thus, application of broad evidence is likely to eclipse context-specific elements of support and result in inexact, and consequently sub-optimal, support of resilience. A point in case is the report by Zhang, Li, Gong, and Ungar (2013) that caring teacher-student relationships did not protect Chinese school children against depression. This nonconformity with the extant literature likely relates to the prioritization of academic achievement in Chinese life-worlds and teachers’ roles being scripted accordingly. Regardless of the reason, it signals the necessity of contextually-specific accounts of how school ecologies support children’s resilience in order to generate the detail needed to support resilience in culturally and contextually relevant ways (Hart & Heaver, 2012; Panter-Brick, 2015; Theron & Donald, 2013).

Furthermore, the persuasiveness of recurring accounts of how school ecologies support resilience could mean that SPs fail to consider that there are less conventional (‘hidden’ – see Ungar, 2006, p. 53 or ‘resistant’ see Ecclestone & Lewis, 2013, p. 8) pathways of resilience. Unconventional supports––ones that do not conform to mainstream practices ––might constitute more effective means of championing resilience for specific children in specific contexts at specific points in time. For example, in the study by Mulloy (2011), a teacher recognized her students’ need for connectedness and how this played into their vulnerability. She responded by inviting them to her home on Sundays to share chicken dinners. Some might judge her actions to be a contravention of the formal boundaries that traditionally regulate relationships between teachers and their students, but it was precisely right for the young people in question. Inevitably, contextualized accounts––i.e. how school ecologies inform resilience in ways that respect the gendered, classed, ethno-raced, cultural, and historic positioning of children––are likely to uncover such non-normative resilience processes. To achieve such detailed accounts, qualitative methods that privilege children’s voices will need to be used more frequently than in the extant literature (see Table 1, supplemental material).

Overemphasis of reactive, child-focused support of resilience

The infrequent evidence of initiatives by teachers, SPs, or others to anticipate risks to children and act preventatively, and/or advocate for optimal life-worlds for children, suggests that school ecologies do too little to pro-actively support resilience. For example, only Mulloy (2011) reported how the school ecology she was investigating pre-empted failure by providing the structural supports children needed to respond constructively to the school’s climate of high expectations. The uncommonness of pro-active support, activism, and/or attention to structural influences could be related to concerns that school-based support of resilience has limited potential, given the apparent intractability of threats (such as poverty) to children’s wellbeing (e.g. Doll et al., 2011).

If this mentality prevails, adults will perennially underestimate the importance to resilience of redressing structural inequality, and of advocating for changes to life-worlds and circumstances that put children at risk (Ecclestone & Lewis, 2013; Hart & Heaver, 2012). Then, they will do too little to change children’s contexts and perhaps too much to change children (Ungar et al., 2014). In this regard, nascent reports of teachers experiencing ‘vicarious resilience’ (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014, p. 473) as a consequence of supporting student resilience, and subsequently being inspired to advocate for constructive social change that would benefit their students, offers hope that proactive championship of resilience can flourish. It models an activist stance that SPs would do well to heed.

Under-estimation of the costs of supporting resilience

The non-school related resilience literature has queried whether young people make short- and/or long-term sacrifices in order to adjust well to adversity (e.g. Easterbrooks, Chaudhuri, Bartlett, & Copeman, 2011). For example, some South African families expect children to adjust well to the loss of loved ones and to curtail expression of grief (see Heath, Donald, Theron, & Lyon, 2014). Such adjustment is often taken as a proxy for resilience, but at what personal cost does this come? In contexts of chronic adversity that demand continuous accommodation of stress and hardship, does such personal cost escalate (Masten, 2014b)?

There is very little analogous concern in the literature on how schools informally support resilience. There is occasional implicit reference to the personal costs––such as sacrificing private time or disbursing personal funds––that support of children’s resilience demands from teachers and SPs (e.g. Mulloy, 2011; Theron & Theron, 2014). Only Acevedo and Hernandez-Wolfe (2014) explicitly mentioned that, at times, teachers experienced ‘compassion fatigue … in conjunction with a lack of support to process challenging situations, confirming that working with children who have suffered trauma and live in environments with multiple stressors can negatively affect caretakers’ (p. 487). Poor recognition of the price of supporting resilience––also over time––will challenge how school ecologies, and SPs in particular, sustain such support.

The way forward

The synthesis reported in this article provides a starting point for SPs and others to champion resilience by cautiously using the everyday school-based resources and processes that characterize how school ecologies matter for resilience. Simultaneously, this synthesis implies that SPs and school ecologies need to advance less well-reported mechanisms of resilience, including championing resilience in contextually-sensitive ways, pre-empting risk and advocating for systemic change, and being mindful of the costs of resilience in order to sustain support for resilience. Accordingly, there is a need for additional accounts that unpack the detail of how specific school ecologies support resilience as part of their everyday business. In doing so, SPs will be supported to recognize, evaluate, and apply/adapt recurring (as per the synthesis in this article), but also less-travelled, pathways of school-supported resilience. Ideally, such accounts need to be informed by children themselves (Wright et al., 2013), as well flag systemic influences, such as structural inequalities or socio-cultural beliefs, that shape resilience (Ecclestone & Lewis, 2013; Theron & Donald, 2013). In doing so, deeper understandings of the complexities of resilience should emerge (Masten, 2011), and SPs/school-based service-providers enabled to cautiously initiate and/or sustain meaningful resource-provision, reciprocate children’s negotiations for supports in contextually-relevant ways, and advocate for life-worlds that prioritise children’s well-being.

This resilience-themed edition advances the above. Drawing on the everyday practices of teachers and schools in Global North and Global South contexts, Kumpulainen et al. (2015), Liebenberg et al. (2015), Sanders and Munford (2015), and Tatlow-Golden, O’Farrelly, Booth, O’Rourke, and Doyle (2015) document how school ecologies enable, and occasionally constrain, resilience processes. They translate these four accounts into implications for careful, contextually-appropriate, systemic practice by SPs/school-based service-providers. Importantly, these accounts privilege children’s perspectives that reify generic resilience processes. Additionally, given the apparent primacy of teachers to children’s resilience and the potential costs to teachers of this support, Beltman, Mansfield, and Harris (2015) interrogate whether Australian SPs and other support staff encourage teacher resilience in ways that sustain teacher support of students’ resilience processes. In doing so, they support growing understandings that SPs must also attend to the resilience of teachers (Acevedo & Hernandez-Wolfe, 2014; Masten, 2014b). Finally, Vanderplaat (2015) provides a solution to the under-utilisation of proactive, systemic initiatives to facilitate resilience. To this end she theorizes on the potential of a sociological imagination to heighten SP sensitivity to how structural and systemic influences inform resilience, and to broaden school psychology practice.

In keeping with SERT (Ungar, 2011), these six expositions are mindful that social ecologies, more so than children themselves, are responsible for facilitating resilience processes in contextually-relevant ways, even though children co-contribute to the achievement of positive outcomes (Motti-Stefanidi, 2015). Consequently, the theoretical and practice-related implications of each contribution de-emphasize children’s roles in processes of positive adjustment, without negating children’s involvement. Hence, this resilience-themed edition signposts the importance of continued researcher and practitioner attention to contextualized, systemic accounts of resilience that capacitate SPs to advocate for, enable, and sustain meaningfully differentiated co-investment in children’s positive adjustment.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Linda C. Theron, DEd (Educational Psychology), is a Full Professor in Optentia Research Focus Area, North-West University, South Africa. Her research explores why, and how, some South African young people adjust well to chronic adversity (see www.Lindatheron.org / ).

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