Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Resilience and
Capacity-Building
Introduction
The term ‘resilience’ is utilised in many scientific fields, including the physi-
cal sciences (for instance, resilient metals bend instead of breaking under
strain [Campbell, 2008]) and the environmental sciences (e.g., resilient
ecological systems are those that can absorb disturbances and reorganise in
response to change [Walker et al., 2004]). In the social sciences, resilience
is commonly referred to as the characteristics and processes related to the
ability of people to ‘bounce back’ or recover after adversity (Smith et al.,
2013). With such a wide range of applications, the term ‘resilience’ has been
described as confusing (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013; Reid & Botterill, 2013;
Walker et al., 2004), and Rose (2007) warned that ‘resilience is in danger of
becoming a vacuous buzzword from overuse and ambiguity’ (p. 384).
Yet the contribution of the resilience research, especially as it relates
to the social sciences and education, cannot be underestimated in
prompting a shift from deficit- to strengths-based models for under-
standing and developing individual, group and system capacities for
thriving in challenging circumstances (see Berkes & Ross, 2013; Carmeli
et al., 2013). In this chapter, we explore further the concept of resilience
for individual, team and community capacity-building by interrogat-
ing data from three research projects in diverse educational contexts:
a community informatics project in a regional town; teachers and
their work supporting student well-being; and a university education
research team. The chapter consists of the following three sections:
A selected literature review that examines the meanings of resilience
and a conceptual framework that articulates the protective factors
associated with individual, team and community resilience
An examination of the conceptualisation of resilience and
protective factors associated with individual, team and community
resilience in the three selected data sets
Concluding implications of the analysis of the data sets and
resilience for understanding and enhancing contemporary
approaches to capacity-building in educational contexts.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Resilience and Capacity-Building
While there are obvious synergies across these definitions, they also
reflect two issues in conceptualising resilience that remain unresolved.
The first issue is whether positive adaption is best characterised as a
return to stability, recovery or transformation. Fletcher and Sarkar
(2013), in their review of individual resilience, noted that recovery is to
be distinguished from resilience, as the former involves the experience of
a period of non-normal levels of functioning, whereas resilience entails
maintaining a normal state through the experience of the adversity.
Berkes and Ross (2013) observed that it is not always desirable for com-
munities to return to or maintain an original state through the experi-
ence of adversity, and they argued that positive adaption should instead
be considered along a continuum from stability to transformation.
The second issue is whether resilience is experienced only in the con-
text of adversity or hardship. This has been contested on the grounds
that it excludes consideration of the capacity to thrive in situations of
non-adverse challenges that still demand a resilient response, such as
that which might be experienced in dealing with complex day-to-day
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Resilience and Capacity-Building
Note: Individual resilience factors sourced from Miller-Lewis et al. (2013) and Smith et al.
(2013); team resilience factors sourced from Carmeli et al. (2013), Morgan et al. (2013),
Salanova et al. (2013) and Stephens et al. (2013); and community resilience factors sourced
from Buikstra et al. (2010), Hegney et al. (2008), Kulig et al. (2008) and Norris et al. (2008).
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Resilience and Capacity-Building
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Resilience and Capacity-Building
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Resilience and Capacity-Building
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Contemporary Capacity-Building in Educational Contexts
Conclusion
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015
Resilience and Capacity-Building
DOI: 10.1057/9781137374578.0015