Interventions for resilience in educational settings: challenging policy discourses of risk and vulnerability

Abstract

‘Resilience’ has become a popular goal in research, social policy, intervention design and implementation. Reinforced by its conceptual and political slipperiness, resilience has become a key construct in school-based, universal interventions that aim to develop it as part of social and emotional competence or emotional well-being. Drawing on a case study of a popular behavioural programme used widely in British and American primary schools, this paper uses a critical social understanding that combines bio-scientific and social constructionist ideas in order to evaluate key challenges for policy, research and practice framed around resilience. The paper argues that although critical social perspectives illuminate important contemporary manifestations of old problems with behavioural interventions, and challenge narrow, moralising definitions of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’, they coalesce with behavioural perspectives in a search for better state-sponsored responses to the shared question of how to build resilience amongst ‘vulnerable’ groups and individuals. Instead, we argue that critical sociologists need to resist responses that offer more sophisticated behavioural interventions and generate new forms of governance and subjectivity.

Keywords:

• critical analysis
• state

Acknowledgements

The bio-scientific ‘rules’ framework referred to in this paper was set out by Dr Peter Lund, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham. Funding for the BRRUM project, from which this paper was developed, was provided by the University of Birmingham. We would like to thank three helpful reviewers who provided guidance on revision and especially one reviewer who also provided helpful information towards additional content and interesting observations about the terrain of this paper.

Notes

1. A key imperative for accelerating the introduction of PAThS in American schools was the Columbine school massacre of 1999.

2. We are grateful to one of the journal’s reviewers of this article for drawing these to our attention.