Resilience Promoting Educational Resilience: Conceptual

Resilience Promoting Educational Resilience: Conceptual Frameworks, Institutional Advantages, and Personal Development A confluence of social, economic, and political issues continues to sharpen the focus of public and policy attention on educational, systems and institutions and the role they play in shaping individual and community opportunities.

While the creation of an educational system that provides for the adequate and ample growth and development of learners throughout their schooling is of course desired, the current system is far from reaching this state and many students face significant disadvantages that have been empirically demonstrated to cause a reduction in academic progress and success.

Because of this, the phenomenon know as "resilience" has become the subject of much attention and inspection as researchers and practitioners in the educational arena attempt to determine how some students are able to overcome or recover from academic disadvantages and setbacks and return to normal or even super-normal levels of achievement. As the following will demonstrate, resilience is built by a multitude of factors on the institutional as well as the personal level that require a proper framework for understanding and implementing.

Developing a Meaningful Framework In order to fully understand the concept of resilience in academic settings and determine effective practical means of enhancing and increasing the prevalence and efficacy of such resilience, it is necessary to develop a proper framework for examining and understanding the very concept of resilience. First and foremost, it must be understood that academic or educational resilience can only be adequately measured and observed after established academic disadvantages have had a known influential impact on the population or sample being examined (Brackenreed, 2010; Martin & Marsh, 2009).

That is, resilience requires some action, event, or set of circumstances to be resilient from, and while the latent potential for resilience might exist in individuals and/or institutions that are not placed at a significant academic disadvantage, such resilience cannot be made manifest and so cannot be examined.

Studies of resilience must necessarily focus on underperforming students and/or schools with demonstrated disadvantages, such as poverty -- the most prominent influential factor and possibly a primary cause of other measured disadvantages -- minority status, breakdowns in standard social support systems, etc. (Martin & Marsh, 2009; Brooks, 2010; Bryan, 2005). As simplistic and perhaps pedantic as this definitive factor may seem, it has important theoretical and practical implications.

Explicitly defining a difference between manifested academic resilience and the potential for academic resilience allows these two facets of overcoming academic and educational barriers to be examined separately. This allows for the development and implementation of more targeted practical solutions for solving identified problems or enhancing overall resilience in specific institutions and situations or with specific individual learners.

Martin and Marsh (2009) labeled the potential, or more correctly a major contributing part of the potential for academic resilience, "academic buoyancy," which refers to the ability of students to adjust and effectively react to the challenges of a more normalized and stable academic life within a given situation. Academic buoyancy is in many ways an accurate predictor of academic resilience, meaning that a comparable low-risk and normally-achieving population of students can be used in some manner to indirectly measure evidence of academic resilience in other populations (Martin & Marsh, 2009).

This theoretical hierarchy of academic buoyancy and academic resilience, then, allows for closer and more accurate research into the issues involved, which can lead to more effective practical changes in schools and behavior that could lead to enhanced resilience (Martin & Marsh, 2009).

Institutional Features Resilience is often a required part of academic success precisely because academic institutions in many areas lack the resources to provide materials and environments truly beneficial to the learning process, which can make it seem next to impossible for institutions to expend resources in an effort to make changes to the level of resilience exemplified by their student bodies (Bryan, 2005; Peck et al., 2008).

There are many things that can be accomplished at the institutional level that are not especially if at all resource intensive, however, that can nonetheless contribute to higher levels of evidenced academic resilience and increase factors noted as enhancing academic buoyancy, as well (which might in and of itself lead to a lower need for academic resilience and higher levels of initial academic success) (Peck et al., 2008; Bryan, 2005; Downey, 2008).

By creating more effective environments and specifically crafted interactions with students, both individual and population-wide levels of academic resilience and academic buoyancy -- and thus eventual academic progress and success -- can be dramatically enhanced and increased.

A variety of extracurricular activities have been identified as having a positive impact on academic resilience, and in fact this effect is so broad that researchers suggest it is the structure of the activity rather than the activity itself that promotes evidence of academic resilience and certain skills identified with academic buoyancy (Peck et al., 2008; Martin & Marsh, 2009).

The experiences, relationships, and responsibilities of extracurricular activities differ in significant ways from those related to standard academic progress, and it is believed that these lead to positive changes in the personal and psychological development of adolescents that in turn influences educational choices and behaviors (Peck et al., 2008).

Simply creating more opportunities for participation in school and/or academic events and programs has been observed to have an institution-wide effect on academic resilience, and creating classroom environments that foster communication both between students and teachers and amongst students themselves have been noted to have similar effects (Brooks, 2010; Downey 2008). Providing greater access to counselors and other adult support figures is more resource intensive than these other options, however it is also a fairly high-impact and low-cost method of enhancing resilience (Bryan, 2005).

Individual Relationships and Development In addition to institutional changes and features that can be used to enhance the level of academic resilience displayed by a given student body, there are issues of individual growth, development, and relationship formation that directly impact academic buoyancy as well academic resilience (Bryan, 2005; Brackenreed, 2010; Downey, 2008; Martin & Marsh, 2009).

On a fundamental and extrinsic level, students that lack knowledge or experience using certain basic skills are placed at an extreme disadvantage, and the development of individual cognitive abilities can lead to profound levels of evidenced academic resilience as new doors of learning and understanding are opened (Downey, 2008). School counselors can also play a key role in achieving higher levels of individual academic resilience -- and through a series of ongoing individual interactions, lead to more widespread institutional changes --.