Teaching resilience: a narrative inquiry into the importance of teacher resilience

Abstract

This study set out to explore how high school teachers perceive their resilience as they teach a scripted social and emotional learning program to students with the goal of promoting the resilience skills of the students in their pastoral care classes. In this emerging field of research on teacher resilience, there is a paucity of research regarding the resilience of high school teachers in regard to the roles they must fulfill outside of their main function as a subject specialist teacher. In particular, a key role of pastoral care teacher is often layered on to teacher work and there is little professional support provided. This qualitative study took place over eighteen months in an independent faith-based Preparatory to Year 12 School in Queensland, Australia. It employed a narrative inquiry case study that engaged with teachers, managers, and parents. The data collection consisted of a series of three in-depth interviews for each of the seven participant teachers, field notes, and a researcher journal. The data are analyzed by reflecting the themes that occur in the teachers’ stories. The findings reveal that these high school teachers had some tacit knowledge of their resilience, that is, they identified common factors from the literature that constitute resilience in their personal life; however, they did not explicitly apply this knowledge to their professional practices.

Keywords:

• pastoral care
• teacher resilience
• student resilience
• narrative