Empowering Educators to Foster Student Resilience

Abstract

Children across the world face various challenges as they develop. This is especially true for asylum seekers and immigrant youth who arrive in a host country traumatized by their past and current experiences. Since educators are ideally poised to foster protective factors among children, we call on teachers to aid in the construction of childhood fortitude by becoming aware of the individual characteristics of resilience and then making efforts to build it as they instruct and interact with students. To this end, this article provides teachers with a list of indicators of childhood resilience and provides several recommendations for how educators can boost positive development at school. The model outlined is easily incorporated into general and integration education instruction.

Keywords:

• Protective factors
• resilience
• trauma
• vulnerable children