Tempering expectations: teaching ‘resilience’ might be code for something else

I’ve been thinking about the concept of resilience a lot lately, and wondering what it means for teachers and students in our schools.

When my own children were younger, I happily supported the keys to success concepts, highlighting how important resilience is in daily activities.

We talked about bouncing back after something goes wrong, building a tough outer layer, acting in ways that help our friends and so on.

In short, I bought in completely to the ‘resilience’ mindset as a tool for navigating the ups and downs of life.

But then I found myself using the word resilience when we noticed the rain on the roof was making its way through the roof and onto the books of the children sitting in the classroom.

I used it when there weren’t enough seats in the art room for everyone, so a few students had to stand up to work. I encouraged my children to be resilient when the music teacher went on maternity leave and wasn’t replaced, leaving brand new instruments sitting untouched and unplayed in the music room.

It made me pause and think about whether this was really resilience at all, or something that ran a little deeper.

Is resilience really just ‘bouncing back’ or is it actually a code word we use when what we really mean is ‘putting up with things that should be a whole lot better than they are?’

Fast forward to the teacher strike in Victoria last week and I began wondering whether resilience was something applied evenly across all the school systems in our country.

Is resilience a tool we teach to students and reinforce through their teachers that means they accept how the world is, and don’t expect anything more?

When the classroom roof leaks or the workload is extraordinary or the classroom budget runs out in Term 2 or there is no money to pay for a CRT so classes are combined – is this resilience, or a broader strategy to prop up a floundering education system?

When we say ‘resilience’, do we sometimes mean different synonyms, like ‘flexibility,’ ‘stoicism’ or ‘plasticity,’ or do we instead really mean something quite different that reflects teachers and students’ capacity to learn despite significant systemic obstacles in the path?

Importantly, do we teach the same resilience message to all children equally, or is it something that is disproportionately taught to students and by default their teachers in less affluent schools?

I decided to run my theory past AI, to see if it could help me explore the data and find some comparisons. I broke down the education system into government, Catholic and independent schools, with a mix of primary and secondary schools.

I included a total sample of 480 schools across the country, with a representative sample from each of the states and territories. I asked AI to examine the website of each school and use a simple yes/no rating system to record whether ‘resilience’ was included on the website, either as a component of a wellbeing program or a value of the school itself.

The results were intriguing. Across the country, our sample of Catholic schools showed that more than 77 per cent included reference to resilience along with 62 per cent of government schools.

In many cases, these were part of wellbeing programs or included as a value within the broader school community.

By contrast, the sample of independent schools included resilience in just over 50 per cent of cases.

Instead, the websites often focused on values such as ‘excellence, character, leadership and scholarship’ – terms that signal a very different teaching and learning experience and hint at quite different expectations.

It’s certainly not the case that independent schools don’t place importance on resilience, nor do they ignore wellbeing for their students and teachers. It’s just that often they prioritise other values instead.

And in any education setting, we know that what we leave out is every bit as important as what we decide to include.

So where does this leave the concept of resilience, and what it means to a student at an elite school such as Brighton Grammar, Scotch College or Camberwell Grammar compared to a student at a government school in a lower socio-economic area or a Catholic school?

Indeed, where does this leave the teachers who work in each system, who need to both apply resilience to their own daily experiences and teach it to their students?

Perhaps the answer is to look carefully at the words we use when we talk about values and wellbeing, and be more precise with the ones we choose.