Abstract
In this paper I examine the concept of educational resilience as it has emerged in the research literature. I then evaluate the utility of the concept in the area of developing more effective schooling for children with special educational needs. It is noted that resilience needs to be promoted on three fronts, work on the individuals resilient strategies, promotion of resilience through the organisation of the school and the curriculum, and promotion of resilience in the community. This paper concentrates on those aspects of the school's organisation, ethos and pedagogy that are claimed to be powerful contributors to resilience.
On this account resilience emerges as a super-ordinate concept under whose umbrella many well researched facets, such as self-efficacy, attribution theory and cognitive enrichment may find a unified purchase.
The paper ends by considering ways in which practice may more responsive to the imperative to promote resilience, and calls for further research in the area to identify and disseminate examples of the effective promotion of resilience.
The number of possible interventions available to special educators is bewildering in its variety, and is increasing daily. How does the practitioner know which elements 'hang together', or perhaps work against each other. Eclecticism, the suck it and see principle, is ,as far as we know, as good a principle as any. I have always believed that ALL interventions can be successful or unsuccessful in equal measure, the significant factor being the commitment of the practitioner to the task, and her ability to inspire the student with the belief that this time progress is possible. Nevertheless, certain interventions do seem, in practice, to hang together. That is, a teacher who favours one intervention in say, reading will probably be drawn to certain other interventions in other subjects, in classroom organisation, beliefs about discipline etc. Rather , then , than trying each suggested intervention and measuring it against ones predispositions, I suggest that if we could discover an appropriate organising principle for the selection of curriculum and organisational interventions, then we would have a clearer idea in advance as to whether a particular intervention would hang together with our existing practice, and whether it was likely to serve the same aims.
In this paper I suggest that the concept of Resilience could act as one such organising principle. I will review the research on Resilience, indicate how it connects to a range of well known interventions in Special Education, and suggest that the resilience enhancing properties of an intervention should serve as a guide to its selection. I further claim that whilst the fostering of Resilience is a vital requirement of education for those with special needs, it is also an important ingredient for all education. Indeed, I claim that if regular curricula fostered resilience more effectively, then many aspects of Special Need would not arise in the first place. Fostering Resilience is therefore seen as essential to the project of Inclusive Education.
What is Resilience?
Masten, (1994), defines resilience in an individual as successful adaptation despite risk and adversity. Wang, Haertel and Walberg (1994) describe the characteristics of resilient children, but also discuss the characteristics of schools that promote resilience, and communities that promote resilience. The concept was originally developed in the field of psychopathology, (Garmezy, 1974 in Wang, Haertel and Walberg 1994), but has since become the focus for much research in social and educational disciplines. A seminal longitudinal study, carried out over thirty years by Werner and Smith, (1982 and 1992) concerned a cohort of children on the island of Kauai. These children were tracked from infancy to adulthood. Various factors such as poverty, low levels of family education, family discord, perinatal difficulties etc. when evident in the first two years of life, were seen as potential predictors of maladaptive outcomes at 10 to 11, and at 18 years of age. On the basis of being affected by four or more of the risk factors, a third of the cohort were designated as 'high risk'. About a third of the high risk population (10% of the total cohort) were deemed to be resilient because they had adapted well in childhood and adolescence.
This early study suggested that these 'naturally resilient' children had a number of early advantages, including good relationships with their caregivers, and had developed certain qualities which enabled coping strategies to develop. The research undertaken since then has been largely concerned with identifying the factors associated with resilience, and Wang and Haertel (1995 pp.199 - 200) provide a summary table of risk factors/ adversities and vulnerabilities, protective factors that mitigate against school failure, and resilience promoting indicators (see table 1.) Whilst it is not claimed that the school can provide all the necessary resilience promoting factors, for work on and in the home environment and the community is also important, it is claimed that the organisation, ethos and pedagogy of the school are powerful contributors to resilience. A source of optimism is that many of the factors listed can be actively promoted in the school, and have been the subject for research and development on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of the important factors relate to affective outcomes such as achievement orientation, school satisfaction, self-efficacy, academic self-concept and internal locus of control. Some factors relate to school-wide organisation such as a safe and secure school, academically orientated culture, inclusive classrooms and good parent and community links. Other factors relate to pedagogy, including student-centred learning, active teaching, positive peer relationships, meta-cognitive and self-regulated learning, co-operative learning strategies and advanced curriculum content and higher order thinking skills for all children. I will go on to relate some of these factors to wider research in education, and claim that we have enough knowledge available to use the concept of resilience as a basis for building a curriculum that serves both the therapeutic needs of those at risk, and the cognitive demands of the curriculum. Indeed, my claim is that the two are not necessarily separable, and that good and effective educational strategies serve to strengthen the qualities of resilience that will serve the student well in wider aspects of living productively in the harsh climate which many of them inhabit. Further, as I have suggested above, these strategies may serve to reduce the incidence of children developing Special Needs in the school system.
Some problems with the concept of resilience.
Lest it be thought that I am uncritically embracing an idea because it holds out the (unrealistic) promise of a panacea for all educational and social ills, let us first consider some of the problematics, as well as the promise, of the concept. Rigsby (1994) suggests that resilience is a 'Quintessentially U.S. concept' that cannot be divorced from the broader cultural context of individualism and mobility striving that characterises U.S. society. He traces the concept to the U.S. hero myth as immortalised in the stories of Horatio Alger in the second half of the 19th century. These popular stories usually featured a teenage boy, usually fatherless, who overcomes great hardship to get ahead in the world, supporting his widowed mother and his younger siblings, defending them from the unscrupulous, and celebrating the virtues of thrift, hard work, morality etc. He suggests that it is rather comforting to the American psyche, and the political and economic structures that support it, to believe that it is always possible to overcome adversity by your own efforts, and that those who are overwhelmed by their circumstances are in some way culpable, lacking moral fibre. As Bartelt (1994) warns it is possible to 'pursue this argument (as to the importance of resilience) in the sense in which many conservative policy makers have, e.g. ignoring the problems of the central city while prescribing better morals for its residents', p.105. Rigsby (1994) suggests that too uncritical an acceptance of basing policy on the promotion of resilience would commit oneself to some questionable assumptions, i.e. that everyone should strive to get ahead, that the arena of competition for getting ahead is open, fair and accessible to all, that there are few points of no return so that one can always get oneself together and re-enter the game, and that disadvantages are individual and can be overcome with individual effort. To overcome these powerful challenges it is important to ensure that our educational efforts are allied to wider programmes of social justice (see Griffiths 1995). It does not follow, however, that because education cannot provide the total solution that it is absolved from its responsibility to make its own specific contribution to the larger social goals. 'If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.'
Bartelt (1994) also has some methodological misgivings about the concept and its use in educational policy-making. He raises questions about the face validity, content validity and construct validity of the concept. Basically he is asking whether the indicators (of resilience) measure that which they purport to measure, whether the concept can be empirically specified, and whether the construct offers consistent relationships with other variables that it is supposed to be related, or unrelated, to. He cites Kaplan's (1964) critique of the use and measurement of the concept of intelligence. Kaplan accused researchers in that area of 'operationism in reverse, that is, endowing the measures with all the meanings associated with the concept'. Bartelt sees the imputation of resilience as a case of operationism in reverse. We see successful adaptation as evidence of resilience, and unsuccessful adaptation as an absence of resilience. Resilience itself, however, is never directly observed, it is always imputed. 'As an empirical concept, then, there is difficulty in identifying an unambiguous referent to this force/factor of resilience', p101.
This problem can be overcome if we are careful to realise, as is the case with intelligence, that we are dealing with a theoretical construct, and avoid dealing with it as if it were a reification, having the properties of a 'thing'. People can be talked about as being tall, it is also possible to measure the amount of 'tallness' (height) and use their relative measured height to compare them to others. Although this is true of some aspects of our being, it is not true of all aspects. It might make sense to talk of people acting in an intelligent way, to do so is to use an adjective to describe their action, against publicly agreeable standards. This does not mean, however that intelligent behaviour relates to a quality 'intelligence' in the same way that the adjective tall relates to the quality of height. To speak of 'intelligence' is merely to use a convenient shorthand for a theoretical construct that helps us to discuss the reality of intelligent behaviour. This is also true of resilience (and creativity, bravery, goodness and many more), where we can sensibly talk of someone acting in a resilient manner, and refer to this capacity for convenience as 'resilience' without committing ourselves to the existence of an actual, quantifiable empirically verifiable quality. The point for researchers and educators is to identify those aspects of a person's experience that lead them to be able to act in more resilient ways, i.e. to confront successfully the challenge of risk and adversity, and to systematically encourage such experiences, and allow the student to learn from them.
A further note of caution is sounded when it is noted that an imputation of resilience carries with it unavoidable normative connotations. That is, a reaction is only called resilient if it conforms to dominant cultural values. The values present in a particular community may lead to alternative reactions that would seem to make sense from the perspective of that community. Bartelt (1994) cites the example of a youngster living in a Hispanic community in the U.S.A. Here a strong pro-family ideology, and the reality of poverty would lead the young person to leave school as soon as possible and seek full time employment in order to add to the family's income. Would not this positive action be seen as an example of resilience as it has come to be defined? By what criteria, then can we distinguish academic success as resilience from dropping out as resilience? I think that this dilemma can be resolved by examining the agency of the individual or group concerned, and determine the amount of genuine choice being employed in the decision making process. As Wang, Haertel and Walberg (1994) point out 'Passivity in the face of adversity rarely provides the information for an individual to develop strategies that can be useful in stressful conditions', p.48. If one is passive, resigned to what appear to be inevitable outcomes, feeling helpless in the face of seemingly overwhelming conditions, then ones 'life-choices' are unlikely to be made from genuine choice, or from a position where alternatives are even acknowledged. The fostering of resilience would then involve arming the subject with the wherewithal to plan and execute choice, and the furnishing of relevant information on which choice can be wisely based. In this way short term choices which seem to be resilient will be less likely to lead to long term consequences wherein resilience is diminished. It is this sort of approach that underlies the influential work of William Glasser, which he has developed as Reality Therapy (Glasser 1965) Control Theory (Glasser 1985) and Choice Theory Glasser (1998).
The challenges to the concept of resilience are important, and must be taken into account if we are to plan policy in the light of resiliency research. I believe that the objections can be overcome if we do not see the concept as a simplistic personality construct, but see it, as Rigsby (1994) suggests, as a multilevel set of causal structures and processes giving rise to a complex set of interactions involving person, social context and opportunities. Bartelt (1994) also wishes to see resilience defined as a systemic concept 'determined by its place within a dynamic model of the self, the family and the community, each part of a dynamic environment contextualising the educational process,'p.101. We must also be aware of the normative nature of the concept, and avoid 'cultural imperialism' by being sensitive to the coping strategies developed within communities themselves, working to extend rather than override them. As Gordon and Wang (1994) conclude, resilience seems to have come of age, gaining broader respect and attention from the scientific community. 'Building a research base for effective human intervention, first to prevent dysfunction and, when necessary, to correct and heal, will be one of our greatest immediate challenges.' p. 193.
Resilience building strategies and the development of the curriculum for children with SEN.
As noted above, Wang, Haertel and Walberg (1994) examine the various factors that promote resilience. In this article I am chiefly concerned with the role of the school, though it is realised that the school can also work alongside other agencies in order to achieve wider social goals. I will be arguing that the school has an important, though not exclusive contribution to make, and that the most appropriate focus for its efforts will be both the official and the 'hidden' curriculum that they espouse, rather than a separate 'therapeutic' endeavour that is 'instead of education'. In what follows I will review the research on the individual elements that are associated with resilience. Much of this research is long standing, and will be well known. What I am suggesting is that the concept of resilience acts as a focus for drawing together several strands of research in order to form a unified basis for our thinking about the curriculum and pedagogy for children with Special Needs.
Individual Resilience.
Constructs such as self-concept and self-efficacy have become an established part of the educational discourse. The idea of promoting a healthy self-concept as a way of overcoming a multitude of educational ills has a great attractiveness and surface plausibility to many in the teaching profession. A search through indexes of educational research into the self-concept throws up hundreds of titles. The ways in which this theoretical construct can actually be operationalised and lead to positive educational outcomes, however, has remained largely elusive. Marsh (1990) discusses many of the problems associated with research into the self-concept. One of the main difficulties has been practice of using global measures of self-esteem to measure outcomes when the intervention has been aimed at a particular aspect of the self-concept, e.g. reading ability. Marsh argues that we need to see the self-concept as a hierarchical and multi-dimensional construct. Then we can focus on discrete aspects of the self, targeting our interventions to particular aspects and measuring change in those areas only. Thus the self-concept has various major sub-divisions, e.g. the academic, social and physical self-concepts. These in turn can be further sub-divided, so that the academic self- concept will include separate concepts of the self in mathematics, in English, in practical subjects and so on. Within each of these further aspects of self-concept are packed, so that the area relating to English will contain separate concepts of the self relating to such areas as spelling, reading, poetry, composition etc. The suggestion is that by concentrating on specific aspects the child can quickly be helped to improve their self-concept in that area, having tangible evidence of their progress, especially where mastery learning techniques are employed (see Bloom1971). It may well be that this improvement in self-concept may generalise to other areas of functioning, but the dynamics by which this happens are imperfectly understood. Further, the global self-concept is held to be resistant to change, partly because of its multi-dimensional make-up in which many variables may be competing. It is for this reason that I am suggesting that our efforts should be directed at enhancing particular aspects of the academic self-concept, e.g. 'I am a reader', 'I am a good problem solver' etc. rather than putting too much faith in commercial packages aimed at a general 'feel good factor' that may only last as long as the session in which it is developed, and not affect other areas of the curriculum.
Self-Efficacy.
An aspect of the self-concept that offers a particularly fruitful avenue for research and development is the notion of self-efficacy. This is the belief we hold as to how far we will be able to achieve success in a particular area. The notion and its importance in educational settings are fully discussed by Schunk (1987), Pajares (1996) and Bandura (1997). By enabling students to believe that success is possible it is hoped that their efforts may be directed to profitable, rather than disruptive activity. As Hanko (1994) has pointed out, discouraged children find normal praise and encouragement difficult to receive or put to good use. Schunk (1987) gives many examples of the ways in which positive self-efficacy beliefs can be nurtured. He suggests that the common practice of promising positive future outcomes for present efforts is unlikely to lead to changed behaviour. 'If you do x (approved behaviour) then y (attractive outcome) will ensue is a well-tried approach. For those who believe in both the possibility of achieving the outcome, and in its worth, this approach may well work. The discouraged child has little in his experience to suggest that either belief is a sensible option. Here it is necessary to take actual instances of successful behaviour and demonstrate that the child is indeed capable, and to help them to understand what part they played in that success. Sadly what often happens is that the child's positive efforts are ignored when something goes wrong, and he is subjected to a lecture on the negative aspects of his behaviour rather than being helped to consolidate and persevere with the positive. Learning from ones mistakes is a possibility for those who don't make too many. For many children with learning and behaviour problems there is a great need to temporarily and tactically ignore incidents of bad behaviour so that they can be helped to make a plan for more fruitful behaviour in the future. A recent piece of classroom research (Trenerry 1998) used self-efficacy approaches while supporting children with entrenched reading difficulties. As part of the programme the children had choice of the difficulty of the work delegated to them. This gave them a measure of control over their work, and also implied a permission to fail should they progress to selecting increasingly difficult tasks. They were also encouraged to make predictions as to the level of success that they expected, thus helping them to build a link between their efforts and their outcomes. The teacher also worked hard to elicit, encourage and reinforce positive self-referential statements. The belief here was that if the students heard themselves saying positive things that once they would not even have dared think, and that these were agreed with by a significant adult, then this would have far more positive effect than teacher praise. In this study not only were there improvements in reading, but the behaviours of the students showed marked improvements. Whereas many of the students were once engaged in diversionary and displacement behaviours, attempting to avoid yet more failure and evidencing great anxiety, they were eventually enabled to participate in the activities, and developed far more positive attitudes both to the activity itself and their own participation in it. There are opportunities in all classroom and school encounters, be they curricular or extra-curricular, to attend to the students' self-efficacy beliefs and enable themselves to see themselves as active agents in their own learning rather than as victims of their past. Hastings (1992) reviews a Dutch intervention called 'Attunement Strategy', an approach aimed at re-awakening the process of prediction and self-review in poorly motivated children. This simple strategy can be used to structure any piece of classroom work. Thus far the reported results in Holland are extremely encouraging, and further reports of the pilot studies carried out in this country are eagerly awaited.
Internal Locus of Control.
An associated construct is the locus of control. This represents the extent to which we believe that we are responsible, through our own actions, for the things which befall us in life. Someone with an external locus of control is likely to believe that events are largely beyond his control, that fate or the actions of powerful others are responsible for outcomes, and that it is not worth trying to affect what happens to him. Someone with an internal orientation is more likely to accept a measure of responsibility, to recognise the contribution of his own efforts or lack of them, and to accept the challenge of working for improved outcomes. In short, those with a more internal orientation are more likely to face adverse conditions with resilient responses. Internality has been associated with more adaptive responses to a range of educational issues (Lefcourt 1982), Henderson (1980) has indicated that internality can be nurtured through educational encounters, and Charlton (1985) has argued that locus of control can be used as an effective therapeutic tool for children with Emotional and Behavioural problems.
Attribution Theory and Motivational Style.
The constructs described above are held to contribute to the larger dynamics of attributional stance and motivational style. (See, Schunk1987, Craske 1988, Rogers 1990, Hastings 1992, McNamara and Moreton 1993 Galloway and Rogers 1994, Leo and Galloway, 1994.) Attribution is the process by which we confer meaning onto events by attributing causes to them. Whenever one sees a person acting in a certain way, we immediately attribute a cause to that behaviour. The attribution will be coloured by a whole range of factors, such as our previous experience of the person or our knowledge of others who have performed similar behaviours. Further examination will help us to confirm or change our original attribution, but in the meantime our attribution is a powerful director of our behaviour towards that person. For instance, if I see an unknown person stumbling along the road, appearing to be speaking incoherently, and scrabbling for something they have dropped, then I may well attribute this behaviour to their being drunk. I may then associate this state with dangers of violent and unpredictable behaviour, and consequently my immediate behaviour may be to cross the road and avoid all contact with that person. On the other hand, if I was aware that the person in question suffered from a complex syndrome of motor disorders, my behaviour might well be to offer help. The important point here is that our attributions, whether they are accurate or not, are powerful determinants of our future actions. When students who experience difficulty with aspects of school attribute the causes of that difficulty to forces outside their control, and come to believe that the situation is hopeless, then they are unlikely to develop resilient responses. There is evidence (see MacNamara and Moreton 1993) that when people develop a low self-concept and an external locus of control, then their attributional pattern may be the inverse of the normal, healthy pattern. Most people who are reasonably secure will attribute their successes mainly to their own efforts, but will allow themselves to attribute their failures at least in part to the incompetence of others, or to random factors that are not expected to recur. This attributional pattern, then represents a systematic ambiguity of locus of control beliefs, 'I'm responsible for my success, but only partly responsible for my failure.' Those with more negative self-beliefs, including many children with Special Needs., will be more likely to attribute their success to outside factors, such as luck, or the influence of a powerful other, but see failure as yet one more confirmation that they are incapable. This is a total reversal of the normal pattern, and could be expressed as ' I only succeed when others are responsible, but I will always end up failing.' If this belief system is in operation, then it is extremely difficult to encourage the person, as success and praise are not trusted, and inevitable hitches are not seen as minor obstacles to be overcome, but as major blocks to successful functioning.
This negative loop is further confounded by self-consistency theory, which suggests that once a self concept, even a negative one has been formed, we work very hard to maintain it, as change of any kind is risky and difficult. Thus children who have been labelled in a particular way, as slow, or irresponsible for instance, and have become resigned to wearing that mantle, will develop behaviours that confirm to themselves and others that the label is the accurate one, and the prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. The outcome of a negative attributional pattern is a negative motivational style. Work by Craske (1988) more recently developed by Leo and Galloway (1994), suggest that when we are faced with a task, we develop a motivational style which determines the selection of the behaviours that we will employ in dealing with that task. The positive motivational style is referred to as mastery orientation. Here our aim is to succeed in the task, and our behaviours are directed at fulfilling that aim. When students, for instance, are working from mastery orientation the teachers' efforts find fertile ground to work in. It is often the experience of teachers of discouraged children that they do not doubt their own skills, or the ability of their students to learn, but become frustrated at the resistance to learning manifested in the behaviour if their students. These behaviours are held to originate in faulty motivational styles. If the student adopts self-worth concern as a motivational style, then their efforts will be directed not at successful learning, but at maintaining their level of self-worth. They will work hard to avoid embarrassment, perhaps adopting a 'who cares' attitude, or refusing to be involved in anything that may cause them to be seen as soft, a swot, a creep or as anything 'uncool'. Here the values of the peer group, e.g. attitudes towards drug use, which may well be ultimately destructive to that person's life chances will take precedence over the values presented by the enterprise of education.
Alternatively the student may embrace the motivational style known as 'learned helplessness' whereby their efforts are directed at demonstrating a lack of ability so that they will eventually be excused from the task. So habituated can the behaviours associated with learned helplessness become that eventually the lack of ability becomes actual rather than pretended, and the disempowering belief that effort is futile comes to direct the student's behaviour. In either case the teacher is faced with the task of helping the student to form a more positive attributional stance so that their efforts may be directed into fruitful rather than harmful actions. It is not that the student is being idle, sadly it takes a great deal of effort to maintain a negative motivational style, the challenge is to tap and redirect that energy, rather than suppress or contain it. The nurturing of a mastery orientation towards tasks will contribute massively towards the student's ability to develop resilient strategies. For a full discussion of these and other aspects of motivation see Brophy, 1998.
Taken together, then, the promotion of the positive aspects of these constructs will do much to provide the wherewithal for the promotion of resilience. Opportunities for work in this area, what Charlton (1992) calls working on the self, present themselves in all aspects of school life. Focussed sessions in P.S.E., in class meetings, circle time etc. may well provide valuable opportunities to raise issues and provide training. What is called for, though, is the application across the curriculum of a pedagogy that has as a major aim the promotion of positive self-views that will lead to the promotion of individual resilience.
The Resilience Promoting School.
In recent times the effective schools movement has captured the imagination of many in both the academic and political spheres. Problems remain as to how far the data collected can be operationalised in terms of increasing effectiveness in particular domains, i.e. children with special needs. Galloway and Rogers (1994) suggest: -
'Research on school and teacher effectiveness reveals substantial differences within and between schools both in pupils' educational progress and, more strikingly, in their behaviour. It is reasonable to assume that these differences reflect the degree to which the pupils concerned feel motivated to work at teacher-defined tasks and to maintain the school's stability by accepting its rules and values. A starting point is to investigate the motivational style of pupils who present particular learning or behavioural problems. The research on school and classroom effectiveness is of little help here.' p. 23.
Clark et al (1997) question the wisdom of the professional special needs community in accepting the more attractive elements of the educational thinking of the effective schools movement. They suggest that the movement's 'excessive managerialism… indicated by the assumption that individual schools, through the actions of their managers, can control their own destinies,' p 184, is misleading. They suggest that schools are located within particular socio-economic contexts which significantly determine how they go about their work, what they can expect to achieve, and what might count as effective in their particular situations. This is where the insights generated by research into resilience may be of great use. Anderson (1994) claims that ' organisational resilience is a much broader concept than organisational effectiveness. In fact, it includes organisational effectiveness as part of its predicate' p.141. The question of 'effective for what purposes?' is raised without assuming a monolithic and bureaucratic definition of effectiveness that can be applied to all circumstances without regard to context. A particular purpose, it is argued, is to promote individual resilience, to maintain organisational resilience, and as part of a wider social system, to contribute to resilience in the community. This systems orientated approach allows us see the behaviour of a system as 'coming from its internal structure and goal-seeking behaviour, rather than being only a function of the external influences acting on the organisation and the organisation's response to them' (Anderson 1994,p.142.) This viewpoint, then, allows us to move away from a pessimistic determinism that suggests that nothing can be achieved in the most adverse circumstances, and also to avoid simplistic definitions of effectiveness. By focussing our attention on our goal-seeking behaviour, and accepting that these goals will be influenced by context and the dynamics of the larger social context we escape the rather circular idea that effectiveness is defined by what effective schools do. Instead we measure our effectiveness in terms of self-generated goals, the promotion of resilience in the actual context being one such goal. This is not to underestimate the real difficulties to be faced by schools in transferring these aims into practice. Of course overwhelming conditions reduce morale and motivation at all levels, however, the research reviewed in this article suggests that schools can make a real difference, and it is suggested that a focus on resilience promoting strategies is one of the factors that lead to an effective response to these difficulties.
In this article I am suggesting that much is already known about the conditions listed in figure 1 that are claimed to promote resilience in the school context. A thorough exposition of the interventions facilitative of these conditions is way beyond the scope of this article. I will therefore confine myself to listing some of the sources so that the interested reader will be aware of the scope of the research that can be synthesised with the aim of building resilience promoting schools.
Taking these lines of investigation, along with many other accounts of successful adaptations to adverse circumstances, it should be possible to build a pedagogy that supports the promotion of resilience, provides therapeutic interventions for children with Special Needs, and yet can be accommodated within any current curricular framework.
The Central Role of the Individual Teacher
Whilst much has been made of the importance of seeing the promotion of resilience as a systemic issue, the role of the individual teacher is still worthy of close scrutiny. The teacher will still need to accept responsibility for the promotion of resilience, and act as a role model for the behaviours associated with resilience. It is a common cry that teachers are not social workers or psychologists, and should concentrate, or be allowed to concentrate on educational issues. Whilst it is true that teachers and other professionals have distinctive training and responsibilities, it is also true that factors from outside the school affect the teacher's ability to conduct the educational enterprise, and thus come under their consideration. I will give one pertinent example.
In their survey on child mobility, Hillman et al. provide some illuminating data. For instance, a child in 1922 would have been twice as likely to have been involved in a road accident than would be the case today. A driver would have been fifty times more likely to have been involved in such an accident (p2.). These statistics seem at first sight to be counter to our impression of roads as increasingly dangerous places. It is not, however, that the roads are actually safer, rather it is the impression hat roads are more dangerous that has led to children being increasingly kept away from them unless they are under supervision. Similarly, in 1971, 80% of seven and eight year olds went to school on their own, by 1990 this figure had fallen to under 10% (p45.). A similar picture applies to journeys for social and recreational purposes (p44), so that the 'playgrounds' of the previous generation are now forbidden to many children. The alternatives being commercial, supervised enterprises, or access to the open spaces allowed only under parental supervision. When we children of twenty or more years ago were out on our own, we did not of course only make our way quickly to our destination, be it school, a park or whatever. We encountered other children, played games without adult supervision, and competed with each other for the use of favoured play places. This all engendered potential conflict, and we quickly learnt that if you wanted to play and avoid too much trouble you had to learn to get along. We had to learn to negotiate rules, observe pecking orders, take turns and make sure that disputes didn't get out of hand, all without the intervention of adults. Indeed, it was seen as a great weakness to resort to telling tales at home. The skills learnt in this environment, especially as they had to be learnt from experience rather than from injunctions from adults, were very useful to educators in the way that they organised our learning. When we were told to sort things out, or organise ourselves, or go away and play productively for extended periods in the barren environment of the school playground, we knew how to. Most of the time! Nowadays the opportunity to learn the appropriate behaviours in naturalistic settings has been vastly reduced by the decrease in child mobility catalogued by Hillman et al. Also the motivation to sort out ones own issues, and the sometimes painful need to experience the consequences of out own behaviours, has been diminished by the attentions of the supervising adult who will be more likely to provide ready made solutions, or intervene in conflicts before the participants have learned how to do it themselves. The participants in many playground conflicts of today are also more likely to resort to more extreme physical measures, as they will most likely be interrupted before full retribution comes from their opponent. Further there is no place to establish a 'reasonable' tariff of retribution, whereby overreaction is seen by peers as good reason to exclude an assailant from future social encounters, and therefore comes to be avoided.
I acknowledge that much of this section is speculative, and would need further empirical research in order for the dynamics that I have suggested to be verified. At this stage, however, I can report that the link that I claim between the well documented changes in child mobility and the changes to behaviour in school has been discussed with many groups of teachers who recognise from their own situations and experience that the hypothesis is at least plausible, and should be analysed further.
The suggestion arising from the above is that the skills and behaviours needed to go about ones normal unsupervised business are the same skills that have been identified earlier as those associated with the promotion of resilience. Only a generation ago the teacher could comfortably have expected that the normal process of growing up alongside ones peers would have provided the opportunity for these things to have been learned and practised. Nowadays, no such expectation can be reasonably held, yet the enterprise of schooling still depends to a large extent on the pupils being able to control and organise themselves, and to settle conflicts without perpetual recourse to the teacher. Today's teacher, then has to consider the whole child, and realise that the classroom and playground are now the only available venues for learnings that once took place in more naturalistic settings. She must then, accept a wider brief, and see many failures in social behaviour not as stemming from individual deficits, but from restricted learning opportunities. She will come to see herself as a provider for these opportunities as a necessary part of, rather than as an addition to, her role as a teacher.
The final, and perhaps the most important aspect of the question that deserves attention is the personal qualities that the teacher will need to develop in order to act as a role model for resilient behaviour. Not only will she need to concentrate on the development of the personal qualities discussed in this article, but also be able to act as an effective channel for transmitting self-belief to others. Carl Rogers (1980) suggested that when teachers exhibit high functioning in the three core conditions of unconditional positive regard, or warmth, of empathy and of genuiness or congruence then the kind of growth aimed at when promoting individual resilience will be achieved. Freiberg (1994) reviews studies of survivors of the holocaust, of child abuse and other adverse situations, and concludes that the presence in ones past of someone, usually a parent, who exhibited real warmth towards them sustained them through the most horrific of traumas. If that experience in the child's background is lacking, then a significant other, such as a teacher can provide such a model, indicating to the child the possibility that they are worthwhile. The case of 'Miss A.' reported in a large scale study on the effects of ones first grade teachers on later life chances (Pedersen et al 1978) resonates well with the belief that a single teacher showing belief in a child can make a longstanding difference to the ability of that child to cope with the difficulties they may face in later life. Sadly many teachers are never aware of the difference they may have made, as the positive effects may only be evident years later. Teaching must be as if it were for eternity, for we mat never be there to see its achievements realised. The unconditional prizing of all our children is probably the bedrock upon which all our other efforts need to be based. This entails the emotionally difficult task of separating in our minds the child himself from the unfortunate behavioural episodes he has become involved in. If we can succeed in conveying, largely non-verbally, that, no matter what, the child has worth, then the positive attributes that we are attempting to promote may well find purchase.
Reuven Feuerstein, the celebrated Israeli educator who was charged with reclaiming the children of the holocaust for productive life in the new state of Israel tells a tale which testifies to the power of positive regard. He was acting as consultant to a young man whose endlessly delinquent behaviour was causing great trouble for himself and those around him. Feuerstein's best efforts at helping the young man to re-direct his life seemed to be having no effect whatever, and Feuerstein, taken with the tragedy of a needlessly wasted life, wept openly. Years later this now reformed man was able to tell Feuerstein how the picture of this esteemed and venerated professor being moved to tears on behalf of this worthless and recalcitrant youth had served to keep him on the straight and narrow ever since. Whenever temptation arose, the man recalled the scenario. Feuerstein claims that from that time onwards he knew that it was possible to demonstrate the depth of ones concern, and thereby change destinies. Changing destinies may sound like an ambitious aim, but it is one that must be embraced if we wish our educational provision to offer more than a few years containment, but would wish it to provide the wherewithal to live life productively in the face of whatever adversity might befall.
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