Exploring the educational turn in resilience discourse in Israel: three moments of frame alignment

ABSTRACT

A new educational paradigm, ‘resilience education,’ has emerged as an effort by states and local communities to provide their constituencies with skills to cope with natural and man-made disasters. While the topic of resilience has seen an explosion in academic and policy interest, little scholarly attention has been paid to exploring the social origins of resilience training. Drawing on the research tradition in history and sociology of knowledge and theorization of practices, this article explores the gradual establishment of the practice of resilience education in Israeli schools and changing assumptions about risks, coping and aims of education informing resilience initiatives in the educational system. Based on in-depth interviews with key figures in the professional field, I indicate the main tendencies in the local history of resilience training since the 1980 s. These tendencies – the normalization of insecurity, the incorporation of new programs within existing interventions, and the creation of a particular structure of training – have interweaved the regular with the extreme, the expert with the lay, and the new with the old. I argue that such tendencies have become no less important for facilitating the establishment of resilience training than the scientific validity and practical effectiveness of this professional practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology
• critical analysis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term expresses a ‘heavy use of education for spreading a culture of resilience at the community level’ (Benadusi 2014, 174), while education becomes a core element in disaster risk reduction.

2. ‘Resiliency in Action,’ https://www.resiliency.com/.

3. Such as the resilience-training program launched in 2008 for the US military, called the ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program.’

4. ‘Urban Resilience in Action,’ https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/research/research-projects/urban-resilience-in-action.

5. Resilience in complex organizations http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2018/resilience-in-complex-organizations/.

6. Emotional Resilience Toolkit” https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publications/emotional-resilience-toolkit.

7. The term originated from Goffman’s concept of ‘frame analysis’. Goffman described frameworks as ‘schemata of interpretations’ that provide a ‘background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being’. (1986:22). Some research has used the idea of ‘frame alignment’ to examine educational policy (see Itkonen 2009).

8. This resonates with Ann Swidler’s claim that practices provide us with an opportunity to see culture as ‘action organized according to some more or less visible logic’ (Swidler 2001, 84).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Galia Plotkin Amrami

Galia Plotkin Amrami, PhD, is a lecturer at the Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. She studies the knowledge and practices of mental health experts in the areas of education, immigration, resilience training, from an anthropological and historical perspectives. Her works focus on interactions between professional discourse, cultural narratives, national ethos, and ethics. She is also interested in the cultural and political factors influencing the appearance of new categories of mental disorders and new professional practices, and the interrelations between medicalization, stigma, and personal experience within educational settings.